Wearables in FRC

[Jon Stratis]

Personally, I find my smart watch incredibly useful at competition. Match alerts and score up did Ares are only a small part of it, but they let me track what's going on at my event, as well as other events with teams I care about, all in a minimally invasive way.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to me, as an LRI, is the quick and easy communication it gives me with the field during practice day. While I'm running around in the pit trying to get teams to pass inspection, I can get short text messages from the field alerting me to issues I need to solve. "Team 9876 bumper number", "team 6789 starting config", and other such messages allow me to quickly and easily address teams that maybe haven't even come up to start inspection, and get them working on fixing things.

And of course there's the step tracking... It's always amazing to see how much I walk around during competition!