Devlog #2
Now that I’ve finished the foundation of my project, I can keep adding tools! On my last ship, I realized I should keep more documentation. So be ready for more devlogs going forward!
To get a little more comfortable with what I’m doing, I decided to add another AI scanning tool that I have been thinking about: a rules checker. The general scanner already looked for physical problems like wiring and cracks, but I wanted something that could actually check a robot against the official FRC rulebook. So I added the actual PDFs of past FRC game manuals (2024, 2025, and 2026) and let the user pick which season’s rules to check against. That PDF gets fed into the AI alongside the photo, so instead of relying on whatever general FRC knowledge the model already has (which could be outdated or made up), it’s reading the exact rulebook for that year while it looks at the image.
Getting the PDF into the AI request in the first place took some figuring out. I had to load it from the app’s assets, converting it into a format the API would actually accept, and making sure it got sent alongside the image without breaking anything. Once it worked though, the difference was noticeable (the AI’s answers started actually referencing real rules instead of guesses).
The bigger challenge was AI usage limits. Not “too many messages” though. Instead, it was more that other people using the same free model at the same time meant my requests were competing with everyone else’s. Half the time a scan would go through fine, and the other half it just wouldn’t, with no real pattern I could find.
To fix this I… haven’t yet, honestly. Still an open problem :(. Hoping to hear from you guys for some ideas!
I’m a little nervous because AI kind of has a negative connotation in FRC. To address that issue, I’m planning to make the whole app not centered around AI so I’ll be adding more tools.
Excited to keep going though, because I just started programming my new idea: adding a battery tracker!
View it here: https://mirage54321.github.io/Robolens/