Idea:
Have a hotkey to add score zone 1,2,3
Buttons for the same thing + flip, hang, allows hanging, etc.
Then calculate ratings when writing to the database based on how many they scored from what zone, and give them a point value with long shots prioritized. Or have it mapped to many game controllers (say 6, 1 per team) to have one person focusing on each robot with only one computer (requiring no network).
Then write a phone app (or something of the like that does not require a full laptop, a pen and notebook (paper not computer) would work), for pit scouting. Have checkboxes for features, and an area for comments. Then feed it into the database and calculate the features score of the robot.
When you get the data, you need to know what kind of robot you want. If your robot can already support other robots, then having another robot to do so has priority 0. If you can’t and they can, that might help if you can hang from them.
I began working on such a system, but stopped because I had to develop code for the actual robot. I developed mine in PHP because I could easily network a few of the programming laptops to scout, and it worked nice with MySQL. I used PhpMyAdmin to read the raw data, but never had a working ranking page.
The scouting system we used last year involved pieces of paper with 4 boxes on each side, with check boxes and tally counts for things + comments. We asked the scouts (freshman) to total the tallies at the end, so the data enterers would not have to, but being freshman they didn’t. The data enterer would sit somewhere with power and type in all of these sheets, and had a runner to deliver them from the scouts. The data system was an Excel spreadsheet, with linked sheets for Human data entering (what we focused on), ranking, and various calculations. Our robot scouting system was much less technical, involving Chet and Norman writing notes in their notebook for when it came time to come up with the pick list. This system, while labor intensive, worked really well.