[RoboScout]

Hello fellow scouters,

FIRST Team 1073 made the switch to a tablet system in 2012, using up to six Andrdoid tablets to capture the scouting data for pit and match scouting. We have had the tablets sync to a central laptop over bluetooth, where the scouting data is processed and stored in a database. From there, all sorts of reports can be retrieved, including a weighted scoring list of teams that represent our "pick-list". The central laptop provides a web server to serve the reports over HTTP.

The bluetooth sync works great. We generally sync each tablet one at a time to avoid any contention, and have experienced no issues to date with that method. We also use a 3G tablet to upload the collected data to another copy of the central application that is running up in the Amazon Web Services cloud. We did this so that any team member with a smartphone or internet access can view the scouting data in real time from anywhere.

If anyone wants some additional information on how our system works, send me a private message and I'll be happy to provide as much detail as you need. All of our code is available from GitHub, and that may save you some time should you want to get a head start. In fact, our Android tablet application itself is generated from a spreadsheet that defines the attributes that a team wants to collect/measure. We can easily generate a custom application for you with your scouting "sheet" to give you a taste of what the system can do.

KenSt (aka RoboScout)
Mentor - FIRST Team 1073