Hello Chief Delphi!
For the last six months I’ve been coding a scouting app for the team I’m a student on, Team 980 Thunderbots. I’ve decided to share it with the FIRST community in hopes that it helps people scout.
It’s designed to function modularly. It has the ability to scout matches before saving them either to the local device or sending it via Bluetooth to another device running the app as a Bluetooth server.
In a later version I’ll be adding the ability to send your data in real time to Google Sheets (every match, not just a single export).
I’m currently working on redesigning the UI for viewing the data stored on the device, and the home screen UI.
I plan to release a beta in 2017 while I finalize the data structure for the 2017 game before releasing the app on the Play Store in time for competition events. Consider this the beginning of the “alpha” period
Looks like there is a option to save to a Bluetooth server (I assume you set up a device as this server) or save the data to the device that is being used for scouting.
The 1.0 release will have a screen for sorting and viewing the data, I will be working with team members experienced with ranking robots and who would be picking robots for eliminations to design the view. An old, sad, bad version of this view is currently integrated into the This device screen.
A future release will support Google Sheets, allowing you to upload your data in real time. (I need to work out the kinks, it’s not as stable as the rest of the app.)
I’m open to adding more methods of export in the future if you feel the app is missing something.
179 ran into a similar issue with exporting our webapp based scouting system to google docs and resorted to using HTML tables and the IMPORTHTML() function to get the data into google docs. It worked very well but has a few issues that deserve a separate thread. If you would like to work on co-developing a system for this send me a PM. I also have a WIP processing system and viewer in google docs that Swamp ran at 2 of our off seasons that worked as expected.
You talk about exporting data to a google sheets document, would this document be set up to also act as an input for devices that could not run the app? ie ios devices or PCs? This would be very helpful for situations where not all the devices used for scouting are identical, the biggest pitfall to this, that I see, is that the sheet would have to be set up to not overwrite data from multiple devices, basically make sure that any data entry is specified to match number and team number so that hopefully nothing is overwritten with data from another device when they the sheet syncs all the data from all the devices when they do get a chance to access the internet.
I realize that many teams looking at this kind of scouting app would be using team-owned devices for this purpose, but we don’t have budget for something like that, however almost all our students have smartphones and for those who do not, we do have a few team laptops.
Even without the ability suggested above I really like how this app is looking and I look forward to checking it out for the 2017 season.
Offline. In the past, we’ve scouted on paper and manually inputted data to excel for analysis We’re looking for a good way to digitize our scouting and save some effort without completely changing the process.
Google Sheets input is supported on multiple devices to the same spreadsheet. It’s additive, so no data is replaced or overwritten. It does require an Internet connection but you can use Bluetooth to transfer data from disconnected devices to a Sheets-enabled “master device” automatically, which my team has used.
It’s not a “sync” so much as a “send”.
You have full control over what you do with your spreadsheet.
