Team 2834 (Bionic Black Hawks) is happy to release a new version of our scouting app, Black Hawks Scouting, for the 2023 season.
In September, we published the first version of Black Hawks Scouting, a scouting app designed to be easily configurable and reusable to give us a standard platform across multiple seasons. With this app, we were able to quickly create the scouting forms we needed for the new season.
Key highlights of the app include:
Easily configurable with JSON files
Match and pit scouting (multiple configurations side-by-side)
Numerous widgets to build scouting forms with - dropdown, image, stopwatch, etc.
Works offline without a download
The Blue Alliance integration (with data caching for offline use)
Built-in Data Inspector to view and manage scouted data
Black Hawks Scouting’s design goals include versatility, flexibility, ease of use, offline usage, and security. Details are given in the original announcement post and the GitHub repository.
Feel free to share any feedback and questions that you may have. We appreciate new ideas and contributions to make Black Hawks Scouting work for everyone.
Just tried the app out, and I have to say this is really solid. The introductory videos were very helpful. My only question is is there any documentation for what options there are for customizing a scouting configuration? For instance, what the available metrics are, and what json arguments they take.
All documentation is available under the docs directory of the repo. The Configuration Files document gives details on the JSON structure and possible customizations. The other documents give specific details on different parts of the configuration.
I just added widget validation today in response to another user’s question under the original topic. You can look at my reply and the documentation for the feature to know more about it.
Aiden, I followed all the steps in your training video (which is awesome, by the way!) I have no coding background, so your detail was very helpful.
I’m having trouble with one thing: the Event Key / team loading sections . I must have done something wrong related to the Blue Alliance and the API key. I created an account on TBA. In my account, I went to the “Read API Keys” section, and clicked “Add New Key”. In your video, I pasted that key into the section you indicated.
I completed all the steps, and the app looks fine in my browser, but in the Event Key section, when I click “Load”, nothing happens. Am I supposed to find the event key somewhere on TBA website and manually enter it? I’m not sure how to get that section to work. Thanks!
You can find the event key for a competition through its TBA page URL. It should end with the year and a code (like “2023mijac”). You can paste it into the “Event Key” input on the Team Selection page.
Once you do that and click “Load”, the app remembers the event you entered (provided the TBA data loaded successfully). When you use the app a second time, you can leave the event key blank and just click “Load”. This will also work offline since the loaded data is saved by the app.
I know I’ve asked about this before, but I’m still curious about the exact details of how you utilize this system. We’re using the built in Android quick share feature that you mentioned to get all of the data files to one tablet, but then how are you sharing that data? We have historically collected all the data into something like an Excel spreadsheet that can be viewed on cellular, but Android tablets can’t do that. Our closest solution right now is to use quick share to get all the CSVs to one tablet and then plugging that tablet into a laptop that’s running the Excel sheet so that we have direct access to the tablet’s file system.
We use Bluetooth to transfer the data files from the master tablet to a computer, where we then import the files into Tableau. At competitions, we will have Tableau already set up for analysis, so this is the only step we need to process our scouted data. We don’t analyze our data in perfect real time, and this is what we found to work the best with our scouting setup.
Is there a way to make the selected team number appear in the header so that scouts can refer to the number while scouting?
Also, is there a way to increase the size of the navigation options at the bottom of the scouting forms? With the tablets we use some people are having issues selecting the correct page.
Having the team number appear on every page was something that we had also considered for ease of scouting. The latest update of the app now has team information as a header:
I’ll also test the app on our scouting tablets later today. We had thought about making clickable elements slightly bigger on mobile, but refrained from changing anything immediately since our tablets were not readily available at the time.
Something I noticed while setting up our system for our week 1 event is that for playoff scouting the app is still configured for single elimination bracket rather than double elimination - we don’t plan on using it during playoffs but it’s something that I figure you guys might want to be aware of
@AidanSun05 do you have a sample/dummy event with matches setup? If I enter in an event day - 2023mijac - it connects but since the match data isn’t yet ready it doesn’t display anything.
We absolutely love this app and have been adding some customization to our fork of it to display a qr code from the data inspector page for a selected record, read a qr code, and a data analysis page that would display aggregate data such as averages for the the questions. Its still a work in progress, but this was a great base.
Thanks for pointing this out. The app has been updated with Qualifications, Playoffs, and Finals selections corresponding to the double elimination (tested with the 2023isde1 event).
Black Hawks Scouting 2023 Update 1 (v2023.1) is now available. Highlights of this release include:
Widget value validation
A new toggle grid widget
Team information headings on each page
Enlarged navigation links on mobile devices
Updated match level selection for double elimination
View the changelog for full details on this release. To update your copy of the app, follow the instructions in the Updating Black Hawks Scouting document.
We would like to use the scouting app for the St. Louis event this weekend. We are typing MOSL as the event code but it doesn’t seem to be working. Any hints on what we are doing wrong?
