I am looking to develop a scouting app this summer to be the ultimate scouting app. I want to know what kind of connectivity teams want in a scouting app. My team went to the Wisconsin Regional and we used a custom 100% online solution and had no issues with it at both regionals. If your team where to use some electronic scouting solution what would you pick. would it be an online solution or would you want to have offline data collection. Please fill out the form to let me know.
Thanks.
Full online
Bluetooth(or some other connection) to server in stands
If you ever want it to be used in michigan there needs to be an offline option. The michigan state championship has no cell service, especially in the stands. Would kill any online scouting app.
I would highly recommend reaching out to 8033 as one of my teams freshman did, they have a fantastic system with local QR code systems and server connection.
FRC struggles from too many variants of projects that can’t get enough users to kick off the ground and being able to work together on major development of their scouting app would likely guarantee that what you help build will be both functional and widely used.
Is this just due to regionals you go to not having great service? Or do you want the security knowing your system will work? My team thought about making a offline backup but didn’t because everyone on my team had really good cell service at the regionals but of course. YMMV
There has to be a better way to do this. Ever year, for the last 5 years I’ve been involved, there is a new ultimate scouting app, over and over again. There is no way efforts are best spent recreating basically the same apps over and over again.
*No wireless communication. Teams may not set up their own 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax (2.4GHz or
5GHz) wireless communication (e.g. access points or ad-hoc networks) in the venue.
This rule only bans Wi-Fi, Bluetooth is allowed at an event as long as it’s not on the field.
For my team (not related to the person you replied to, but I figure it’s relevant) even though there’s generally service at both of the events we regularly go to, we also ended up at the Seacoast event last year which was in an old manufacturing building that basically acted as a Faraday cage. Anything requiring internet would have been really problematic. Even at the event at our high school (North Shore) there are a number of people on the team who don’t get good service at the school. Relying on cellular is generally finicky.
Also, we use team-owned tablets for scouting. Setting up internet to those tablets would require a hotspot and ethernet cables which would be a pain to try and deal with in the stands, especially since you’d also need a battery set up for the hotspot.
We could pull off online scouting for our regular events, but it would be harder, and leave us vulnerable to ending up unable to scout if we had to go to an event without decent service.
Internet Sync on ipv6 (Verizon on my phone sometimes tethers in only ipv6)
Bluetooth Sync
Local network Sync (Ethernet or 900/3.6/6/60 Ghz Wifi)
QR Code Sync with one big qr code
NFC Sync if we use android devices
Flash drive sync - auto dump to flash drive on ios/android/windows/mac
Also combinations of these. It’s pretty normal to not have internet in the stands but have internet in the pits.
Bonus points if all my students’ phones can join a mesh network that auto syncs and propagates data as they walk between the pits and stands. Then step 2 would be an ultimate version of slack that runs off the mesh.
I do want to share my thoughts as I have made the mistake of Bluetooth based scouting before last year as a caution to any teams looking to use something similar this year.
When used at competitions, a Bluetooth Low Energy solution was very sloppy and had trouble connecting to each of the devices with the sheer number of people and the noise that their devices were emitting. An offline solution wouldn’t obviously have this problem, and we eventually switched to a version using USB at MSC.
I strongly disagree. I believe that these projects made by students are great opportunities to learn the development process. Teams that have low development resources and motivated students should maybe seek a premade solution, but the reinvention of the wheel in this case allows for students to grow their passions in computer science and project management.
I’ve been improving and tinkering with our scouting solution for all 4 of my FIRST years, and while it might’ve been easier to pull up ScoutingPASS to collect data, it has been a valuable learning experience. Despite the failures we’ve had, I’ve loved the experience of working on our application, and I’m sure many other students on various other teams have too. Plus, it provides for a talking point between teams; I’ve met so many gracious students and mentors who are willing to share their stories of their custom scouting solutions, and the passion is as inspiring as the rest of the robotics competition.
Your “ultimate” doesn’t necessarily equal other’s “ultimate”.
With that being said, I’d recommend looking at alternative modes to transfer data. QR is the easiest. My team uses Google sheets which fulfills many requirements/considerations that other teams have (shareability, usability, visualization, and on/offline editing). Remember to always design for off-line (not all venues have amazing cell coverage) and if it’s online or can be sync’d online, that’s great.
Definitely! There is a whole new level of “pit talk” when it comes to the various team scouting solutions. If there was one “primary” scouting app that most teams used, there would be little fun in strategy talks with other teams.
What would suggest instead? I believe the OP’s intent is to have a more open solution that could be contributed to by others, I may be mistaken, and I would agree that this effort isn’t necessarily the most efficient approach, but I struggle to see something different.
I am on a team with the OP, and I’m wondering what you mean by this. Do you mean it’s unethical to pursue this as a tool for other teams because it perhaps omits the development that would be needed by the teams using it, Our intent was to make strategy more accessible to teams in our area, many teams at the Wisconsin and Minnesota regionals still paper scout, we wanted to make being a strategic partner in an alliance easier and have features for both pick list strategy as well as next match strategy, which is often overlooked.
cracks knuckles - alright this will take a bit… never mind @Vasista has it down:
More specifically, our teams end goal is a system that supports data transfer via QR codes, Bluetooth low energy, wifi (mobile data).
Some other notes:
As mentioned numerous times in this thread not all events have free wifi.
Any data transfer method that requires cables is tedious in my experience.
Asking students to have mobile data (and potentially roaming mobile data - not every team is american) is IMO insane. I, as an adult, only recently decided it was a luxury I could afford.
As per the Event Rules hotspots are definitely illegal (see E301).
While there has been some debate as to whether or not Bluetooth is allowed in general, using it as an ad hoc network is also explicitly banned under E301. To be entirely honest I am not sure if all usages of bluetooth qualify as an ad hoc network and would appreciate the clarification.