Sonic Scout is a set of applications created by students on Sonic Squirrels (FRC 2930) to do offline scouting:
- An Android app. A QR code is generated on your Android tablet after you enter scouting information.
- A Windows/macOS laptop application. It is a QR code scanner that stores the data in an offline database. You (the scouting “manager”) sit in the stands with your laptop application as your scouts bring you QR codes. That data can be exported to Excel or whatever analytics software you use.
New in this 2024.07.29 release:
- The Android app and Windows application have been prebuilt. Just download them to try them out.
- A single script to do “development” (you do source code modifications, it does download, installation, building of apps and launching of the QR scanner and Android Studio)
You will need your team mentor to start any development. The programming languages are Java and OCaml. (Mentors can contact me directly.)
Enjoy, Jonah
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Looks well documented.
Could we get a few screenshots and captoons of a few app features in this tread? It really does help the community to see stuff without installing, no matter how seemless the install may be.
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Great feedback! Thanks.
(I’m adding in pictures to the project page as we speak).
The first picture (“Overview”) below is an overview of all the software at once:
- In the top right there is a scout entering match information into an Android tablet.
- On the laptop screen you will see the scouting “manager” capturing a QR code from another scout who has completed their scouting. The laptop software converts the QR code into scouting records into an embedded laptop database.
That picture is from a YouTube video (Develop Cross-Platform Software using 2+ Languages @ 04:35) describing the technical underpinnings of the app especially the technical requirements (ex. why offline?) if you are into that sort of thing!
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The Android tablet has the following workflow (top left to bottom right) for a scout to record match information:
EDIT: That isn’t the full set of pages. For example, there is a page to enter free-form notes.
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Any interested teams: I’ll need some explicit "FRC <your team number>: interested and will know better by YYYY/MM/DD" replies.
Here’s why I am asking now …
- Once a student has taken their first term/semester of Java, they have 80% what they need to hack on the Android app. It helps that I’ve provided tools that will do most of the app development setup for them.
- However, they won’t know the architecture of mobile applications, so navigating an app codebase will be difficult without some training on mobile and backend architecture.
- Also, students need a machine sufficient to do Android app development and launch a WSL2 VM: Windows 10+ and 8 GB RAM. A school provided laptop is rarely sufficient. It is better to check prerequisites earlier.
- Part of my mentees’ motivation was the love of robotics and competition, and getting familiar with what life could be after high school. And part of the motivation was having something unique and directly relevant to college to put on their college applications. That is where OCaml helps, since it will be familiar to most professors in CS departments and (from my limited dataset) looked favorably compared to the conventional pure Java/Python applicant. So as the school year starts, if you have strong students who don’t want to do robotics since “everybody” does it (etc.), this is your selling point.
- Most students will need some training with OCaml. My training is a dramatically reduced form of Cornell’s CS3110 YouTube series … just enough that students can understand and hack the code.
Here’s the thing … I can do the prerequisites check and the training! But: 1) A mentor needs to be present for obvious reasons and 2) The more people who want training the easier it is for me to justify hosting it.
All the best, Jonah
