Usable Tablets for Scouting

[James1902]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

For those of you who are using android tablets and such, are you using wifi? If so, I believe that's against the rules. FIRST officials have been known to use a spectrum analyzer at events and go find people running wifi.

Here on Team 696, we invested in hardware to do it legally without wifi. We are running 10.1" Windows Tablets with USB-ethernet adapters to a wired LAN in the stands, and we disable all wifi. The tablets were about $120 ea and are decent, but battery life is an issue.

Team 339 just started Tablet scouting last weekend. (I wasn't there so all of my reports are from the students.)

We're using 7 Amazon Fire tabs ($50 each on Amazon right now). We sideloaded the FRCKrawler app and the only thing we used WiFi for was to sync the match schedule the morning before we got to the competition.

Data is synced to a master tablet via Bluetooth every few matches. Overall the students said the experience was positive and after a few database hiccups during the first matches the whole thing worked pretty well.

We're adjusting some of our metrics for this weekend and hopefully we'll have everything squared away by Friday.