pic: 254 Presents: Cheesy Scout

[Pat Fairbank]

I've tried many different methods of scouting over the years with the various teams I've been on, and I've also had the opportunity to observe how 1114 does it. Based on that, I've converged on this list of requirements for a scouting system that approaches the optimal:

1) No reliance on an internet connection -- too many venues don't offer it, and mobile hotspots can be flaky
2) Data collection uptime must be 100% -- you only get one opportunity to collect each piece of data from a match

• Corollary: data collection can't depend on devices that require power
• Corollary: data collection needs to be easy -- it can be boring and we want to facilitate rotation between any of the students sitting in the stands

3) Data entry can lag collection, but we want aggregate scouting data to be available throughout the day, to help with qualification match strategy
4) Data entry needs to be 100% accurate

Cheesy Scout satisfies (3) and (4), but falls short on (1) and (2). 1114's system (paper, with manual data entry completed in time for the picklist meeting) satisfies (1), (2) and (4), but doesn't provide (3). Last year, we collected the data on paper and then a couple of students entered it into the computer as fast as they could, which satisfied (1) and (2) but was slightly too slow for (3) and had some issues with (4), not to mention that data entry was a tough and undesirable job.

So this year our paper scouting sheets will have bubbles to fill in and we'll task someone to feeding them into the scanner. If we lose power to the scanner/computer in the stands we can easily relocate it somewhere else without losing data.

1503 did something like this in 2011, and it was pretty effective although there were issues with the scanner used. I'm hoping to fix that this year with a higher-quality scanner.

Of course, this only represents about half of our entire scouting plan. Come find me at competition sometime and I'll be happy to talk you through the pit scouting, data analysis and picklist meeting parts as well.

[dcarr]

Thanks Pat, this is some of the best, most logically thought-out scouting advice I've seen.

Update: just realized you are the guy who made frclinks.com. No time like the present to say thanks, this makes my life so much easier every day.

[Joe Ross]

What OMR software are you using? We were looking at going to scantron for next year.

[KevinGoneNuts]

I'm just gonna say how much of a tease this thread title is. All I see is "254 Presents" and I instantly think they released their robot.

On a related note, this scouting system is really useful!

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

What OMR software are you using? We were looking at going to scantron for next year.

A custom-written one since our scouting sheets are pretty specialized. There probably wouldn't be much difference in effort between hooking an existing one up to our sheets/database and writing one from scratch in our language of choice (using an existing image processing library).