Good Scouting Tablets That Run Tableau

[bobl]

In the past Team 58, The Riot Crew, used laptops with a custom MS Access program. The data was collected on Dell Axim PDAs running Windows CE and was synced to the laptops on a regular basis.

This worked very well but had its limitations, small screens for data collection, no keyboard for typing, no camera for pit scouting, AND battery life.

This year we purchased 6 HP Stream 8s running Windows 8.1. We then created a custom C# application using MS Visual Studio Community Edition and saved its data to a MS SQL Express database. The Scouting teams were able to use these much easier then the PDAs. They have nice cameras for pit scouting and an on screen keyboard. (We did purchase some bluetooth keyboards as well) The tablets sync to a laptop that is powerful enough to ran Tableau.

The great thing about this approach is that the development software was free and easy to move from one system to another.