Do any teams have a way that they think is super effective? I know of one team that is using a Google Form to keep track of scouting info. I am looking for a way to do this with iPads, phones, or tablets without a need for internet connection.
I prefer paper but I got nothing but a major advantage of digital is that you can share with other teams more easily then paper.
Digital also means there isn’t some poor kid stuck in the stands typing things into a spreadsheet all day, reading from crumpled slips of paper with terrible handwriting. It makes management and organization of the data easier, and makes the whole system smaller and easier to transport. Using some kind of phone app is probably the gold standard, though after collaborating with some teams who have scouted with paper for years, I can see how paper’s a feasible option, even if it’s inefficient.
I could contest every point but the underlying message I have is this.
If you have a paper scouting system and its bad or inefficient its not because you used paper, its because you have a bad scouting system.
Either way
One constraint I have for a scouting system is I need to be able to access the information at the driver station and G29 is pretty clear about how that is supposed to go down. Nothing that can communicate with people outside the castle.
My team usually uses a cheap android tablet and uses an app that our chief of strategy has developed as a score calculator while we have pods of 4 people in the stands reporting on each alliance while 1 person in each pod is writing down information in an excel document given by the people around them. We also have 1 person in each pod filming matches of us or our opponents so we can review it after.
Yes using excel and a paper notepad
My team uses a Raspberry Pi and hosts a local version of our scouting webpage. We then use an old network bridge (like last year’s) and connect to that via Ethernet. But we use paper at the same time, for some reason.
Our team uses our scouting app, FRCKrawler, that uses Bluetooth instead of wifi. It’s available on the Google Play store and it seems to work pretty well for us. You can also add in your own metrics! 