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FIRSTMap Scraper

This scraper is likely to be a high-maintenance item, as there are a number of hacks to work around incomplete team info from thebluealliance and differences between place names in different databases. This scraper makes use of FRC 1418's tbapy, a Python wrapper for The Blue Alliance API. Location data for most places is downloaded from GeoNames, but manually entered data comes from Google Maps.

The scraper was built on Python 3.8.

Usage:

  1. Copy/extract/clone the files to a directory.
  2. Install the tbapy library (pip3 install tbapy).
  3. Get a Read API Key from TheBlueAlliance.com/account and put it in a file called tba_token.txt.
  4. Run python scraper.py (assuming you already have Python 3 installed; if not, install it).
  5. Manually find any places that could not be found (such as by using ask_google, which works some of the time).

If the program has to be run multiple times in a row (such as to make adjustments to it, correct issues, etc.), the program can be called with the usecache argument to reuse the already-downloaded GeoNames files instead of taking the time to redownload them every time. Example usage: python scraper.py usecache

The scraper creates a teams.json file, which goes into the data directory of FIRSTMap. This file contains teams' latitude and longitude coordinates. The file teamFullInfo.json is also created, which, in addition to locations, also contains the attributes listed in the scraper's TEAM_ATTRIBS constant. For more detailed documentation of how the scraper works, consult the comments and code in (scraper.py)[scraper.py].

Descriptions of Files

scraper.py - The scraper python script, which gets the postal code data, location data, and team data from GeoNames and TheBlueAlliance and uses the data to create the teams.json and teamFullInfo.json. Intermediate downloaded data is stored in the data subdirectory, which is created by the script if it does not exist. Comments within the file explain the process in more detail.

ask_google - Script to get a lat/lon from the data/broken_places file.
    Usage: ./ask_google >> geo_cache
    This file must be run manually; it is not run from
    scraper.py. It works some of the time.

geo_cache - A pipe delimited file where each line os of the format <location string>|<latitude>|<longitude>. This file is manually built from previous calls to ask_google and other sources.

make_latlng - Extracts the lat/lon from a google place file. Called from ask_google.

tba_token.txt - A file containing a TheBlueAlliance (TBA) authorization token. This is not in the repository, but is required for the scraper to function. The user is expected to get a token from TheBlueAlliance. A logged-in TBA user can create a Read API Key from the Account page. It simply needs to be pasted into a file called tba_token.txt. This is used by the scraper to access TheBlueAlliance API.

YEAR - A file containing the current year for purposes of retrieving team lists from thebluealliance.com.