If my team were to theoretically purchase 7 android tablets, and get a SIM card for each, (1 server, 6 user scouts scouting EVERY qualification match for sure), if you were to give a rough estimate, how much data would you use? (using SuperScouter for a baseline example)
It all depends on how much data you have going back and forth. How many data points per match? How big is each data point (in bits… Depends largely on the type of data)? What sort of extraneous information is passed back and forth (for example, if it utilizes an XML structure to transfer data, you have to account for all the text that makes up that structure)?
Honestly, the best way to determine this is to probably measure a small sample. Set up a proxy to send everything through that you can use to measure transfer size, then run through a dozen sample matches (all over WiFi). You should be able to figure out how much data per match per tablet is used, then calculate how much you would use for an entire event based on event size and anticipated number of matches.
Another team I know looked into mobile data but the size was really high. I would use a short range transmission like NFC for data transfer
See in our whitepaper about how we use Bluetooth to communicate data from 6 Android tablets to 2 central SuperScout tablets. We then use cell data to transmit from those 2 tablets (using two different providers to improve reliability.)
We’ll probably use mobile data. The amount depends on your scouting system. I’ve made our system just send raw data – numbers and boolean in JSON format. I suspect it’ll take no more than a quarter kilobyte per robot per match. For a 100 match event, that’s 150 KB total.
I saw SuperScouter mentioned in the OP here, so I’ll chime in. It uses Google Protocol Buffers to transfer data. Over HTTP, it sends the data in binary, so it is extremely efficient (less than half the size). Since Protocol Buffers do not transfer their structure information with them, that space is not needed. Also, because it is a binary format it ends up much smaller for numerical entries (which are pretty common I would think)
Additionally, if you use QR codes, you will spend nothing on data (but make sure that you transfer relatively often. Don’t want the QR code to run out of space to transfer the data).