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Scouting App Development
Our school along with others in our district recently in received I-pads for the every student, personally I prefer laptops but now we have a common device which our whole team is using and there are some opportunities with this. We were wondering how to develop apps for scouting and team management. Any help is greatly appreciated and we'll gladly share anything we develop if we get that far!
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Re: Scouting App Development
It depends on your programming background. There are a couple ways to do this. Probably the easiest way is to do an HTML 5 application. This is the way we do it.
Programming for the iPad usually requires an Apple Developer license. Well there are a couple ways around this. You can tell your app to cache locally when saved as a bookmark. This is a pain in the butt (we did that the first year and it worked well enough but it was a pain). The other way to avoid getting a developer's license is to use a program like Telerik's App Builder. App Builder has a starter license that is free for projects like this and run your code through their free companion app. You can also program the apps directly in Objective C if you have the knowledge but you will need a developer's license to program for your iPad. (Our team switched to Android because of these issues) |
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I would just get an Apple developers lisence. It only costs $99. This will allow you to program with Swift, which is much easier than objective c and html 5 in my opinion. Once you have an apple developers lisence you can even make apps for other teams to use(outreach).
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Re: Scouting App Development
Don't hesitate to try out other scouting apps created by other teams. It definitely saves you the hassle of creating a new one not that I am discouraging you from doing so. Try out FRC scout, created by team 1730, which is available on the appstore. There seems to be a iBook manual for FRC scout as well. Also Aerial scout, created by team 525, which is also on the appstore. Links included below.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/frc-...824608264?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/frc...46169922?mt=11 http://525swartdogs.org/?page_id=707 http://525swartdogs.org/?page_id=997 When searching for the swartdogs app on the appstore turn this option on when searching for it "Iphone only". IPhone applications work on Ipads as well. The app can only be found when searching in the Iphone apps area(I searched and downloaded it myself on my family's device). I noticed this since I had a bit of trouble finding it on the appstore. Hope this helps. |
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My one recommendation for trying to develop/test any electronic scouting system is that as you develop/test the electronic version, make sure there is also a paper version you can fall back on. You don't want to suddenly hit a roadblock because all of the sudden at the event you can't connect your iPads to the aggregate system.
Set yourselves a hard deadline (a week before you leave for your first event is probably the latest you could make this), that if that scouting system is not complete (though you can always make iterations later) and thoroughly tested, you can fall back on your paper system. |
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Telerik is also a really good platform for designing apps, although it only lasts 30 days. |
Re: Scouting App Development
Also I noticed that you guys(4536) are only signed up for 10,000 lakes. 10k is a week 6 regional, and since you guys wont be attending any of the duluth regionals you guys can test your application out in many ways before 10k. To give a stress test to your scouting application before 10k you guys can turn on a regional webcast(weeks 1-5). Gather all your scouts and view/practice scout the regional at the same time. This way you can get a feel for the game, scouts can be more familiarized with scouting, and you will also give a good stress test to your application. This way you can ensure that your system can handle the stress.
Also as artK mentioned always have a backup scouting system ready. You never know when you might encounter issues at a regional. Better safe than sorry. |
Re: Scouting App Development
Adding on to that, I'd be fine stress-testing a scouting application using webcasts, or possibly even up at Northern Lighs (although that is Week 1).
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Re: Scouting App Development
This should help: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/3037
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I am a programmer, our team created a mobile website that was used for scouting last year. If you have experience with HTML5, CSS, and Javascript, I would highly recommend those over Objective-C and Swift. Making any application on an iOS device, except for a mobile website, requires an apple developer license, which requires a Mac. Even if you write your apps in HTML5, it still requires that you upload your application to Apple via a Mac.
We use Phonegap to build our HTML apps, and I would recommend you to do so as well, because compared to some alternatives, Phonegap is free, Open Source, and there is a wealth of tutorials for it online. |
Re: Scouting App Development
The problem with using iPads and HTML is how you communicate with the web server. iPads don't connect to ethernet and setting up a WiFi hotspot is forbidden by the FIRST rules. 3G-LTE iPads can communicate over the cell system but connection speed can vary greatly depending on venue. At championships Verizon and AT&T become so slow as to be unusable for typical web access. Besides, getting all those dataplans and 3G enabled iPads can get expensive.
We've switched to Android to give us more programing options. We'll be using custom Bluetooth communication to a local server this year. |
Re: Scouting App Development
If you utilize Telerik's platform you can compile your html5 app and use it without a developer's license (they have a companion app that will run your code).
What we have done the last 2 years is to save the data to a local webSql database on the ipad (or Android, or WIndows, etc). We then sync this data up after the event at the hotel. We don't have live data (at least compiled between the devices) but we have really good data the next day. We have also during lunch periods have some people run out to the parking lot, fire up the hotspot and sync up the data with the server. |
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This is still a work in progress so we'll see how it goes. |
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Let me just preface this with some background. For us trying bluetooth was the natural choice for this season. Last season we used a system with android tablets wired directly to a raspberry pi that would service requests. While this idea was great in theory, in practice it meant a lot of messy wires and not quite functioning ethernet ports. Additionally, this system also tied all the tablets functionality to the server, which meant server crashes were disastrous. We might of tried to continue in this vein, even with these drawbacks, but we lost all the team members who knew enough javascript to maintain the system. With this in mind I knew that I wanted our rewrite to be two things, server independent, and maintainable. Immediately I realized maintainability meant Java. Our school has a strong computer science curriculum that does Java second year, and our robot code is also written in Java. Java is also more maintainable, in my opinion, than Python, which is the only other language our team has consistent proficiency in. Secondly, reliability meant wireless. Since I'm not a web guy, this meant a native app, helpfully also in Java. Wireless was actually a tricky issue. Since we couldn't communicate over wi-fi that left bluetooth as the only other high level choice. Unfortunately, despite being in the same language, bluetooth communications between an Android Java app and a computer running a Java app are hard to establish. I just used the built ins for the tablets, but for computer I didn't. Why, one might ask? Because there is no built-in Java bluetooth functionality! Helpfully, or debatably not, Sun published a spec of what they think it should look like, JSR-82. I downloaded Bluecove, an open source implementation, and wrote my server code based on that. Bluecove was really fiddly, requiring 32 bit Java 6 to work properly, but is pretty reliable once it was correctly configured. The biggest problem after setting this strait was a random crash I was getting ever so often, I mention this for sheer absurdity points, the first message transmitted by the tablet never goes through. (I never actually fixed this, it's just handled by my other failed message code.) In actual fact, once you fix up networking code, it's pretty reliable. Once networking works, the server and client apps seem fairly self evident, presuming you know what you want to collect :P |
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