Re: Scouting App Development
 

Can you just use a Bluetooth PAN profile for this, then implement everything using TCP/IP? I have little experience with Bluetooth, but I figure once you have a PAN set up, any of the server/client type programs should work no problem.

I just tried this out with a simple http server on a laptop and connected to my Galaxy S5 and it seemed to work just fine. I've read that the protocol is limit to 8 devices and 3Mbps, but that should be more than enough for simple scouting data.

Bluetooth PAN is the way that were working towards right now. One of our biggest challenges is that we won't have a common device to build an app for since we are relying on student/mentor provided tablets. So our solution will be server/client based. The server will be a raspberry Pi running a basic LAMP setup and then having the clients access using there native web browser.

I have the bluetooth PAN working pretty good on the Pi. Next step is to start developing the code and database.

Re: Scouting App Development
 

I'm also working on a scouting app using bluetooth. Here's a good blog post explaining how to connect an android device to a computer, using JR-82 and bluetooth. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it will work alright.

The network design I'm planning on implementing would be completely decentralized, able to sync data across devices in the pit without internet access automatically, and completely network fault tolerant, not being tied to a laptop in the stands.

To address OP's question though, I don't think 2-3 months is quite enough time to learn how to do mobile app development. Last year, I implemented a system that relied on manually copying data to and from a central laptop over a USB cord with windows explorer. It was pretty ghetto, but it worked pretty well. You can see the source for the desktop version here, and the android version can be downloaded here. Let me know if you want me to put the source for that up. This is what I managed to make in about 3 months on my own with experience with Java. I'm not saying that to brag at all though, I'm not very happy with how the app turned out, and alot of the code inside is absolutely horrible because I was very rushed with mid competition bug-fixes.

All that being said, I thought it was a great experience, and I learned a lot by doing it, and you should definitely give it a shot, whatever method you choose. Just make sure you have a good backup solution like paper or another app, like I did, for if your app isn't ready in time. You can always take what you've made and polish it up in the off season for next year.

Though it is debatable, I am under the impression that Bluetooth is prohibited at competitions.

Re: Scouting App Development
 

T4 prohibits WI-FI, but not Bluetooth.

Re: Scouting App Development
 

Or team had an app for android last year and and ended up running into the problem of transferring data sheet to the fact that we couldn't use Bluetooth and the tablets had no connection to the internet. To get around this we had to convert the data into a QR code and then scanned it into a master tablet that then sent all the data to a computer to be processed. That being said we had very old tablets running android 3.0 if you iPads are new entity l enough you may be able to use NFC communication. I don't know if apple allows developers to access this feature though.

Re: Scouting App Development
 

If i remember correctly, the NFC is only available for using Apple Pay, on the 6th generation iPhones.

The way you used QR codes is interesting! In previous years, I had considered storing match data as bits in a picture, which could be copied form the tablet to a computer. There were caveats in the solution that I hadn't considered, but i'm glad to see that somebody has thought out of the box with scouting and was successful.

Re: Scouting App Development
 

See this link for other scouting apps:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=130174

Team 330 worked with a Scouting App developed by Team 1073 last year that transferred files from the tablets to a scouting computer via Bluetooth and it worked very well. Bluetooth is legal at competitions. However, this App is written in Java and built to compile for Android devices - not IOS. It's much easier to side-load apps on Android. There is a bit of setup required on the central scouting computer.

Students can easily edit a spreadsheet of data elements to collect that is imported and used to automatically build the app. No coding required unless you want to modify the default App. Results can be viewed in a webrowser on the main computer or uploaded to a hosted website (via tethered cell phone) and made available to anyone with Internet access (i.e. cell phones in the pits, etc.).

Ken (a.k.a RoboScout) was a great help in getting this working for us.
See this post: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...95&postcount=8

Re: Scouting App Development
 

So I don't know how useful this will be to you, I only just recently found out about this, but Apache Cordova is a tool that, if I understand correctly, builds native apps (i.e. iOS, Android, etc.) for different platforms based on a common description of how the app works in HTML and CSS and the like. For your case since you said you guys have iPads that may work, but you do still need to have the Apple Developer license which is $99/year.

Here's the iOS platform guide:
http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/4....form%2 0Guide

I don't know if this will be a viable option for your team, but I thought I'd suggest it so you can at least consider it.