I wanted to look into making a scouting program for next year. I have done a lot of work with excel vba user forms but I don’t know if that is the way to go. If anyone has suggestions that would be great! This program would hopefully be used by other teams as well.
With the suggestion of a couple Skunkworks members, we tried Access paired with Tableau this year (with paper being how the data is initially recorded) and it was by far the most effective scouting system we have used anywhere, getting up to the finals at our first district event. (only time we have gotten there w/o being a backup robot) The plan is next year to have it all electronic, but that hasnt been fully worked out yet. We still plan on using Access and Tableau for this, barring any significant issues with getting data filled into Access through an app.
We used AppSheet to create a mobile app for pit and match scouting. All data synced to a google sheet over the cellular networks (you can also cache to the local device and sync later when on WiFi or something).
The general workflow is, create a spreadsheet with all the columns of data you want to collect, link the spreadsheet to an app sheet app, then identify the type of data that should be entered into each column (numeric value, string, enumeration, boolean, etc). Very easy. I set up our whole scouting app, having never used their software before in about 2hrs. Spent maybe another 2-4 adding nice-to-have features.
I actually created a new scouting app from scratch for another NE team on a different division in a few hours Thursday night at Champs.
Can’t recommended appsheet enough. Works on android and iOS, or in web browser on PC. If I can stay motivated… I plan on developing some video tutorials for using app sheet for FRC scouting.
For data visualization we used tableau. There’s a bit more of a learning curve with tableau. There are still features of the software that I don’t understand tet, but with a few hours of use under my belt, we had a fairly capable means of sifting through the scouting data.
There is a whole forum thread for Scouting that has lots of ideas and ways to go about it and would be a good place to start reading about how others do scouting (or just search on the word scouting):
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=36
Generally, Team 180 SPAM’s Poor Man’s Scouting System is likely the best example of paper to Excel with VBA macros. This a simple way any team can put together good scouting data.
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/3353?
There are others like Team 1073 The Force who have bluetooth connected Android Tablets and many others who have built various Apps for phones and tablets to collect the data. Many post to Internet based servers, Google docs, or other databases.
This thread has some examples:
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=154298
There’s a lot out there already and the authors are all ready to help you so don’t feel like you have to build something yourself unless you want to as a learning project - which is great reason to by the way.
In the end, it’s all about determining what information you want to prioritize to select the type of robot partners you need and how to quickly and simply manipulate the data you’ve collected to show it to you the best choices.
Hello, this is the scouting presentation my former team presented at worlds this year, it talks about scouting and data as well as how to use it. But also at the end contact information is available for people you may want to speak to.
http://www.team2834.com/2016-17-world-championship-scouting-presentation.html
Here’s videos from our last two workshops on our scout system:
2016
2015
Here’s a thread with our whitepaper, and some other program links:
If you have any questions or other issues, please feel to contact us through our website address.
If you’ve got the students to do it, we program an android app, collect the data on 6 tablets, bluetooth it to a laptop, and use excel and google sheets to manipulate and report out the data. Has worked pretty well for the past 5 years. Only problem is the occasional inability to access wifi, so we tether something with a data plan to the laptop. We occasionally have used Tableau.
How do the scouts get the data to MS Access? Do you have networked laptops? Paper/pencil then entered on one machine?