[Dan Petrovic]

I'll just share how we did things and what worked and all that when we were at Boilermaker. That was some of the best scouting we've ever done.

Scouting Sheets
Simple. The first lesson when coming up with a scouting sheet. At GSR we had information like "spoilers placed, where tubes were grabbed, if they dropped any, blah blah blah" That stuff doesn't matter. I don't care where they got the tube as long as they can get the tubes and place them well. So I simply made a column labled "# of tubes scored in Teleop". I say column because the scouting sheets were spreadsheets with match number along the side, and the different fields across the top.

So in the cell of "# of tubes scored in teleop" I put 3 lines. The lines were used to tally where the tubes were scored. I didn't put anything about spoilers because if a team can place a tube, they can place a spoiler.

Autonomous scoring was a simply Y or N. So few teams actually scored in autonomous that it didn't really matter where they did it. If it comes down to it, we can just go and ask the team where they score in autonomous most of the time.

I repeated this for lifting. I don't care if a team fell over, if they tried to get up, etc. I only care about whether or not they did it.

One of the best things we've done was have the scouts write their initials under the match number. This helps incase there is a problem. If there is, we know who to find.

Pictures
Our pictures weren't that great either. Most of them were just the backs of people standing in the pit. We got a handful of successful pictures. Also, when we were printing them out, our black ink started to run out.
Note for next year: Bring extra ink cartridges! I know how we can improve on that though. There's no one in the way of robots when they are starting on the field. Snap a picture then.

Software
Software? I have no idea about software, but all I know is that it worked beautifully at Boilermaker. We had a very asthetically pleasing database for others to use. It was accessable through the Sundial network to all teams. There was a list of teams. You click on the number and it shows the match information in a similar manner to what our scouting sheets look like.


When we went to Cleveland in 2005, we came up with good scouting information, but it was murder to those who were copying the info from individual sheets to the master sheet for each team. Filing through pain-in-the-neck accordion folders to find the team. Then copying down the information from one half sheet to two full sized sheets (one for the drivers and one to stay in the stands) times three. In the span of two minutes. I was doing this job and I didn't get to see any matches until Saturday. We don't scout on Saturday. So basically, we took the good from that (the master sheets, scouting schedule, and overseers) and fixed the bad (thousands of sheets flying around, accordion folders, transfering of info from small sheets to master sheets).

We didn't have a computer database then, and now that we have one we don't even use it for our benefit. Atleast we didn't at Boilermaker because the stands were so close to the field and the pits, but when GSR comes around, we might want to. We made it for the benefit of other teams.