Convincing a team to go electronic

[ToddF]

Originally Posted by T.Krauter

Just wondering if you guys use electronic scouting for your team and how much it cost so I can go in with some facts.

Researching the costs is something you should do for yourself, as they will be specific to your own implementation.

And, whether other teams are using electronic scouting is absolutely irrelevant to your situation. The worst possible reasoning for making a decision like this is "because other people do it".

That said, experiences of others are valuable. Our team has done both. We found that developing and maintaining an electronic scouting system was costly in time, money, and student resources. To get it right takes a number of years. The system often needs to be redesigned each year to fit each game. And, when the students with the passion for developing the system graduate, the system falls into disrepair. Our experience is that the cost was not worth the marginal benefit. BUT, our experience should not be generalized as applicable to other teams. Every team is different. That's why you have to decide for yourselves what will work best for YOU.

[Ringo5tarr]

I have seen implementations of both electronic and physical scouting on 1764, and I feel like both have their faults. We did field scouting with a team made app on our school issued laptops, it was a tad bit of a hassle to scout this way as the controls weren't very intuitive compared to the natural motions of using a pencil and paper, also digital had the issue of sharing, we had >10 different members each with their own laptops, so the scouting info all had to be sent to a single laptop for compiling and comparison, it didn't allow for quick looks at different teams when in a bind. Now physical wasn't used to field scouting, and I can't say that it would be good for that, doing different scouting sheets for 6 teams for so many matches is not a good idea, but paper is simple, and you can grab some basic abilities per team from pit scouting before consulting them on strategy before a match (e.g. what defenses can they take, what do they prefer?) but it isn't feasible as a way to determine picks unless you want to take all that information (from field scouting) and condense it to a usable comparison

Tl;dr: If you do take it on, you will have to test it and refine your design to make sure that it feels right o else you're going to make scouting (particularly field scouting) much worse for student's than it already is, try to have a design made before consulting the rest of your team

[asid61]

115 did electronic scouting last year, and our overall cash investment was close to $0. A couple members spent several months on an app that would use QR codes to transmit data to a central phone. "Slave" phones would take data for a match/robot and generate a QR code that could be decoded into data. The "master" phone would quickly read all the QR codes post-match and put them into a spreadsheet.
As a result, we just used the students' Android phones and an app, so we didn't need to buy any tablets or phones. However, I believe we spent many more hours on this approach compared to just using a pre-made app. If you have people with the skills twiddling their thumbs, electronic scouting doesn't need to be difficult.

[dirtbikerxz]

Last year, I made a scouting app using https://www.appsheet.com/. Basically its google forms on steroids. It allows you to easily make input fields and quickly files information in a google sheets. In addition it runs on both iOS and Android. The students mainly used their own phones to scout. (A few used a couple of tablets we had lying around because of the "bigger screen experience". They simply just tethered their tablets to their phones in order to use the app).

The benefits of this approach are:

• It can run on both iOS and Android, so students can just their own phones keeping cost at $0
• The data is uploaded to a google sheets, and data analysis on google sheets is very easy and can be as extensive as you want
• Live updating data allows the drive team to have access to the latest data, that is potentially useful in making sstrategy decisions for matches
• Scouters dont have to worry about having to sync every phone to a "master phone" before the data is uploaded. Each phone uploads data automatically and individually for ease of access
• All the other tools of google sheets are useable, along with a vast number of other easy to use features. For example, I used google sheets' JSON import function to import match data and team data from The Blue Alliance.

[ToddF]

Originally Posted by asid61

A couple members spent several months on an app that would use QR codes to transmit data to a central phone. "Slave" phones would take data for a match/robot and generate a QR code that could be decoded into data. The "master" phone would quickly read all the QR codes post-match and put them into a spreadsheet.

That's freaking brilliant.

[Tangert]

There does not have to be any cost to go to electronics scouting. Almost everyone has the technology with them in their pockets. Nor do you have to write an app. We have been doing electronics scouting for years. Simply create a Google Form(s), that enables information to be input, and then write up some formulas to analyze the data in Sheets and you have a complete cloud based electronic scouting system in minutes. We even have parents in the stands functioning imputing data. Our drive team and scouts work very closely together during the entire competition. The drive coach and the driver are focusing on the current match and the scouting lead/ strategist is focusing one-two matches ahead. At the end how the students play the game is not always based strictly on the numbers, but they play into how they play and they at least consider the data. If we did not have electronic scouting and match scouting, then that would not be possible. I would also highly suggest that you practice this. Sit down and watch the week one regionals/ districts and keep the stats and ask yourself how would we play the game. Just remember no plan of attack survives first contact.