Back in June 2022, one of my team’s mentors ( @Junhee ) decided to write up an electronic scouting system to test out during WPI’s Battlecry offseason event for Rapid React. Since then, I’ve been rewriting it to support more features, and to make it open for all FRC teams that are interested in quickly hopping into strategy!
eScout’s account system is based off of signing up with Google. When you create your own team within eScout, a unique invite ID will be generated for your team, which you can share with your other members. When prompted to join a team, all the user has to do is paste the invite ID, and they’re officially a member of your team on eScout!
In eScout, all data is separated by team. Teams created within eScout have the ability to make their own “competitions”, which essentially serve as folders to categorize scout entries between competitions (it wouldn’t be very good if a scout entry from NYC regionals somehow got confused as a scout entry from Battlecry).
When submitting match scouts, scouters have the option to choose which team the scout entry is stored in (if they for some reason, happen to be in multiple FRC teams), as well as which competition folder the scout entry gets stored in. Since eScout was primarily designed to be easily used during competition, it has a more visual user interface that’s supported for mobile and desktop web browser views.
Additionally, eScout supports the ability for teams to create their own pit scouting forms within eScout. This feature is still in active development, but you can try it for yourself if you’re interested.
Finally, teams can view all of their scouting data on the home page, which can be filtered by team number and competition name. Numerical statistics as well as graphs are provided for whichever filters are applied.
Me and my team tested a somewhat functioning prototype at the Brunswick offseason event in November, and it went quite successful! However, there were definitely a good amount of flaws with the system (such as offline functionality) that needed to be addressed, which I am hastily working on releasing before the 2023 season comes.
Another main goal for eScout before the 2023 season is the ability for teams to create their own match scouting forms utilizing the provided UI elements you see in the current deployment. After all, the team itself should decide what data they deem important when scouting, not the team creating the app!
The current deployment we used for Brunswick can be found here. This itself is still a prototype with quite a few bugs, but mainly encapsulates the end goal of our system when its fully released. If possible, I’d love feedback and suggestions!