How do you do scouting software?

[65_Xero_Huskie]

Originally Posted by t-raum

Our team uses lots of man power and paper to scout. We just had a meeting last night to decide the scouting team. Our plan has two phases:

Phase 1: We came up with about ten questions to ask other teams in order to give us an accurate picture of what their robot is supposed to do. We also are going to walk around the pits taking several pictures of everyone else's robot.

Phase 2: After the work in the pits is done then we will move back up to the stands to watch all the matches. Each scouting team member will watch one robot during a match and record how it does on a form that we came up with last night. The data and pictures will then be entered into a computer in an excel or word document that we can come back an look at later on.

And that's how Team 1625 scouts a regional.

THis is how weve done it the past 3 years.
We used to use palms and such, but they were to problematic to us.
Paper and Pen with students who know what to look for i think is the best because you can run a piece of paper down to the field to give to the drive team so they know what to expect and they can keep for reference.

[EricH]

Paper and pen(cil), followed by loading the data into an Excel spreadsheet, and then analyzing to death.

[jjberrgy14]

This is a question for t-raum.....Could you tell me what your ten questions are going to be. OUr team (Plaid Pillagers) are trying to figure out our scouting ideas and we need to figure it out soon. I think that we are goin got do the paper/pencil old school method, becuase it seems the easiest (and we are a rookie team). Any additional info on areas to focus on when scouting would be very helpful! thanks!

[yodameister]

We will be using a Nintendo DS system for scouting here is one link http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ht=nintendo+ds

[proegssilb]

Software scouting can do some powerful tricks that paper scouting just can't, but really, your team has to decide what suits them. Plus, I'm not sure if those tricks have been implemented. I'm thinking specifically of a "match breakdown", a single-page breakdown of any match, based on current info.

If you decide to make your own scouting software, like most teams, I recommend including a way to keep track of pictures of the bots. That and a "notes" section for experienced people could work wonders for planning, with a couple stats for ranking purposes...

[bduddy]

Good old paper and pencil (mistakes may be made), followed by the Head Scout (me) collecting all the papers and trying to make some sense out of the completely incomprehensible writing contained therein. Also, I try to focus more on performance than on features-I don't care whether it's 2-wheel or 6-wheel drive, I care what its lap time is. What do you guys focus more on?

[JYang]

old school...
we have people w/ pens and papers on the side making notes
and one person who enters all the information into the laptop

[tjcasser]

Normally, I would have posted sooner on this myself, but I've been busy. My wife and I are expecting, about a week after Atlanta.

768 uses a hybrid system - I think there's still value to the pen-paper aspect since it lets you cover more things at once, but we enter everything into a custom application after, for doing analysis. Last year, we had a web-start java app that we were sharing - this year, we're building a web application that runs on XAMPP to make it easier to share data. I'm fairly certain we'll have our system up and running at Chesapeake, don't know yet about the team's trip to Finger Lakes. (Due to travel restrictions from the reason above, I'm not going along.)

I'll probably make the app available mid-week for download in its beta form, along with instructions for installation.

[Larry Lewis]

Here is a link to the thread I started for our new 2008 scouting database. It is up there for any team to use and so is the source code so you can modify it or learn how we made it.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=65300