Since these Fire tablets are so cheap (on sale frequently, including today, for $54 for 8-inch screen, $104 for 10-inch screen), we were considering getting some of them for a few things.
We have experience sideloading apps onto them (e.g. they work great with chrome for FTC scorekeepers/inspectors). It looks like they will run the LEGO Spike Prime app so we could use them for camps and demos with our Spike Primes.
For scouting, though, it appears that there is no way to use a wired connection, so you can’t set up a wired router in the stands for scouting at FRC events (since wifi is banned at FRC events). I am guessing there might be a way to make that work with bluetooth, though. Has anyone done this?
As a small aside I recently went through the process of downloading the Spike app onto our tablets since we also use them for FLL Explore and it requires you to go through the Play store to do it. To get the play store available (since it’s the amazon version of Android) use this as the guide - once you have the play store you’re set to download any apps you need. https://www.howtogeek.com/232726/how-to-install-the-google-play-store-on-your-amazon-fire-tablet/
OK, thanks all. This is cool. We are mostly looking at the 8-inch models since they are a little bit larger than the 7-inch for drag-n-drop programming for the LEGO robots.
I am guessing there are android libraries for generating QR codes and doing bluetooth networking, then. Any specific ones that you like?
We’ve been using Fire 7 tablets for quite a few years on 2052. Our scouting app (FRC Krawler) runs over bluetooth between one “server” tablet and 6 scouting tablets. No WiFi needed (though having internet when setting up an event is helpful).
We just bought 7 of the 2022 Fire 7s to replace our probably ~7 year old original tablets.
If one of your students wouldn’t mind taking up Python and relational data (a real headache of a topic), you can host a Django web app that stores all of your data on a host PC. What my team did for this was we hosted our server over SSH. We used USB Tethering to a mobile device to give the PC access to the internet, and anyone could access our data if they had the IP address of the web server.
Django is a very complex undertaking, so if you or your students don’t feel up to it (I wouldn’t blame them) then you can still apply the same concept. As long as you can use USB Tethering to a phone with service, you can access the internet from whatever device you need. I’ve done this plenty of times not in a robotics context too, where I needed to get work done on a computer, but I didn’t have wifi or able to make a hotspot. Just plug in a PC or tablet or whatever to your phone, enable USB (or bluetooth, but it’s less reliable and battery efficient) Tethering, and get going on whatever you are doing. Worst comes to worst, you can have someone step outside of the venue real quick to access the internet if you don’t get service in the arena itself.
Hello, There are Samsung tablets that you can use. They can be hooked up to a laptop through a usb cord so you do not need to use data or wifi. We have 6 and use Excel spreadsheet to gather data on the devices. Then through out the day you just connect and download the data to the main spreadsheet on the Strategist’s laptop. We have a laptop charger brick that charges everything up in case we need more power.
