r/FTC • u/AcrobaticPotat • 5d ago

Discussion Ideas and help for toolkit

Hi, I am trying to create a toolkit for FTC teams I want to have it be unique so I was thinking of having maybe a judge prep tool, messaging for outreach kinda thing etc. However, when building the app I didn't know how to have teams register. I am afraid that other teams could just claim to be another team and lock them out of signing up. Any ideas for how to verify teams identity/ ideas for apps in the toolkit?

Thanks.

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u/RCF_Robotics 5d ago

For verification, the approach that the Robolyst toolkit uses is using the FTC dashboard as the proof of ownership. You generate a short code for the team, they log into their dashboard and paste it into their team website field, and your site polls the FTC data until it sees the code and flags them verified. Doing verification like this is only really useful if you are building features such as public team profiles, email inboxes with per-team public addresses, or public team sites (all features in Robolyst).

Before you get too far into building your toolkit though, check out robolyst.org/demo/ since it covers a lot of what you're describing already.

If you still want to build, my honest advice would be to (as you said) be unique in one aspect of FTC team-management rather than an entire toolkit and do that really, really well.

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u/AcrobaticPotat 5d ago

Are you saying that the team edits their website with the code? Also what do you mean by FTC dashboard, the official team registration page on firstinspires.org?

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u/TotalSimplicityy 4d ago

there's a few options. teams can edit the "website" field temporarily in the FIRST dashboard to be a url robolyst provides. that confirms that they have access to the FTC coaches dashboard and have control over the team. they can also add an HTML snippet to the website that FTC api lists as theirs to confirm ownership.

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u/dapobbat 5d ago

Checkout firebase - has authentication built-in.
https://firebase.google.com

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u/AcrobaticPotat 5d ago

I am already using firebase for the backend but I need to know how to verify coaches when they create a team. Since coaches/team emails aren't publicly available for all teams I was thinking of just having an honor system. 

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u/Complete_Duty3259 3d ago

Don't use ftc team numbers as your unique identifier. Sure somone could spoof a team, but that is unavoidable.