This program is an Elo ranking system for FIRST Robotics.

Elo ratings are designed as an estimate of a player's skill. This project is mostly for fun. It is interesting to see how a team's competitive strength has changed over time. Elo ratings are also predictive to some extent, so this system could potentially be used to estimate the probabilities of future outcomes.

I have been interested in applying statistical models to FRC for several years. This program has its roots in a python program I wrote in 2014. This was not the first nor the best elo algorithm and many other elo systems can be found on Chief Delphi

The ranking system used here is based on the system described by Caleb Sykes of Team 4536.

This program is build using Diesel, SQLite, and Rust. To install, first install Rust and then install diesel_cli by running

cargo install diesel_cli

For this install to work, you will need to have an implementation of both PostgreSQL and MySQL installed.

Clone the git repository.

git clone [email protected]:CarlColglazier/frc-elo.git && cd frc-elo

Set up the environment by writing the following into .env:

DATABASE_URL=<database-file>
TBA_KEY=<key>

TBA_KEY can be generated here.

Now run diesel setup && diesel migration run. This sets up the database.

We can now build the executable by running cargo build --release. This should take several minutes as cargo has to fetch, compile, and optimize all the dependencies.

Use the newly compiled program to fetch the historic data from The Blue Alliance. Run ./target/release/frc-elo sync. While the program takes advantage of multithreaded programming, this process will still take about three minutes. Making the requests to The Blue Alliance is rather fast, but committing everything to the database is currently a bit of a bottleneck. This would be a good place for a future improvement.

The program keeps track of when each request to The Blue Alliance was last updated, so future sync requests should take no more than a minute.