Everyone who may be considering electronic scouting for the upcoming season,
Now is the time to start assembling your app framework, looking into community solutions/open source, figuring out which devices to use and in-stand charging if necessary, etc. If you are a veteran team at this, this thread need not apply to you, but it may be a good idea to clean up your codebase from last year and evaluate the physical state of your hardware.
Over the last 3 seasons I have seen teams start this process far too late, around week 5 in some cases. These are often complicated systems that need to be relatively bug free as you often have one shot to get it right - the event schedule is often unforgiving. However, the people who will be viewing this thread are not those who need the reminder, please share this with those who may need it.
**Let this serve as a gentle reminder that electronic scouting is a substantial time commitment, many times greater that that of your run of the mill paper solution, get crackin’. **
We had 7 kindles that we loaded and used a bluetooth wifi or something to connect - I wasn’t really involved so I’m not sure. 1 kindle was the “scout master” that would assign teams to the scout kindles and centrally stored all the data. The 6 other kindles were each assigned a robot and had an interface to log data. It worked very well for us this year.
Any kindle with the app could also connect to our database and look at our summary data, what was their average gears/match, where they started in autonomous, etc. Useful for me as a drive coach going into a match.
It just outputs data as a CSV, and it works. It has an internal list for each of the event’s we’ve been to, and it is easy enough to modify. No wifi is necessary, just extract the files from the ‘download’ folder of the phone, then put it into a spreadsheet. Your scouting doesn’t have to use a complex uploading system, it just has to save the data in some way.
I highly recommend AppsSheet for teams without the resources or ability to create a custom app. It works with an excel/google sheets document on the backend. Our most “advanced” function was a SUMIF statement in our test run at IRI this year the feedback was really good from the team. I think our days of paper scouting are over and it really doesn’t take long to build if you know basic excel functions.
I don’t have a demo of our scouting app; but out of frustration trying to deploy Cheesy Parts on a server I mocked up another app on AppSheets in my free time last week:
Holy smokes that part management app is neat. That could tie into our manufacturing and purchasing spreadsheets beautifully. Is there anyway to share that mockup so I can try to modify it for my own team?
I’m trying to see if there is a way for me to share it. One of the limitations is they charge per user.
At a minimum I’ll create a copy of the google sheet behind it and post a white paper or something with some instruction on how to set it up. Ill see what I can do in the next day or two before things get busy for Thanksgiving.
AppSheet is nice from what I know but is hard to learn. Also, you need internet at some point, and that really removes from the value of it, since you need data for every phone. Making your own app for Android is simple, and it is just a bunch of the same elements over and over. There are visual editors for apps, so those are able to be used. Since I know java, I programmed it myself and it works well.
What I have on here about AppSheet is off the top of my head, so correct me if I’m wrong.
Just a reminder, you all are rapidly running into a wall with scouting app development time. I don’t want to see any of this sort of stuff cropping up mid week 6:
Hi my team is going to electronic scouting and we need help incorporating a way to export are data if that’s through a data base or how ever if anyone can help your help is much appreciated and fyi we are codeing in swift (swift is a simplified version of Objective-C) . If you can help let me know on here or by pm also I probably won’t get back to you until Saturday because of work.
No intent of team-shaming here, just an example from the end of build season last year
We start our system in the fall. Regardless, you should start on Kickoff if you have the programmers to spare. It will help you develop your team strategy as you figure out what you’re looking for in other robots.
I agree, you should really get the framework setup for a previous year’s game, and make all of the backend stuff work. Then on kickoff, get it to work for this year’s game.
