well, somebody had to be first

[Mike Soukup]

For WASH, we used HanDBase as our palm side app. It's an excellent program for some uses, but not for robot scouting. It looks like a spreadsheet, and doesn't have any forms capabilities. We considered PenDragon Forms before we started, it looked perfect, but the cost was way too high, and we wanted to distribute the app to other teams, which means we couldn't use anything that required licenses. My team of students wrote a VB app for the PC to automagically transfer the data from HanDBase to Access and take care of conflicting data. With any luck and some hard work, we'll dump HanDBase and use an Palm app that our team develops (custom forms!).

As for pictures, a couple of students ran around on competition Thursday and snapped pictures with a digital camera. At the regionals I believe we had the pictures in our database by Thursday evening, but computing resources was a problem at nats and we didn't get them in at all. What we really need this year is a few students to take some pictures and rename the files (to the team number with leading 0's) using their own computer and to give my team the pics.

Mike