Quote:
Originally Posted by yash101
Couldn't you run the server on one of the laptops being used for scouting? You could get by with 6 laptops and a little MySQL, I'm sure!
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You could very well use on of the 6 laptops as the server machine. With only 6 users, it is extremely unlikely that you will need a dedicated server machine. Also, this should reduce the amount of power your setup will draw (especially important if you are using batteries).
My team has been using an Apache/MySQL/PHP setup for the past 3 years now. We have found it to be fairly reliable and much easier than our old paper system. Of course, our electronic system requires much more work on our part prior to our competition (programming, setup, thorough testing and training), but its well worth it for the added speed and functionality. If you are going to implement a computer based system, I can't stress enough how important it is to test your system and train your users. You want to be able to iron out any bugs in your code, and make sure everyone knows what they are doing well before you get to the competition.
As mentioned before, you might want to experiment with data manipulation with PHP. All of our team's reports have been customized to our teams needs, and are generated with PHP directly from MySQL database. This saves you from having to export data to excel and update it every time the database changes. I've attached examples of 2 of the many different reports we have created over the years.