Team 1334 Presents: A new way of doing Scouting

FIRST General Forum
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Hi all,

One of the things I’ve been working on is a computerized scouting system for competitions. Basically the idea is to host a web server on a computer at competition and have other computers connect to it to input data. Here are some features that the system has:

  • Customizable data fields (currently supports numerical and true/false data)
  • Ability to open multiple input forms at once (in case computing resources are limited)
  • Comment system for qualitative data
  • Ability to rank teams based on any parameter
  • Completely portable - can even be installed to a USB stick

The database system can be downloaded from http://othsrobotics.ca/scouting.html. A guide on how to use it is also available on that page.

Please be advised that there are still some minor bugs in the program so it might behave erratically. I hope to have an update out to fix the bugs before regionals start on Thursday, but if not I will update the guide to include workarounds for the remaining problems

Eric Atkinson,
Lead Programmer, Team 1334

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i use a mac :frowning:

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Unfortunately you can only host the server on windows. But, if you could host it on someone else’s computer you could connect with any OS (just be careful: I only tested it with Firefox :p)

4

What kinda server is it?

My site runs on a tomcat server. If the backend is portable I may be able to integrate it

5

We might just steal it…

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It’s based off of xampp (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html). I’m only currently using the apache and MySQL servers that are bundled with it.

In order to port it, you would need to configure MySQL for the proper username and password, and copy over the htdocs directory.

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any chance it has phpmyadmin. its pretty easy to export the tables using that. if not we can always do it using apache.

Once I have the tables all I’d have to do is make some java wrappers and we could get it up and running :slight_smile:

also how do you connect to the db? php or something else?

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The frontend is a combination of php and ajax. There is phpmyadmin but the problem is the frontend dynamically creates databases and tables as you add data. And because the type of data you want to record is customizable, the number of columns and their names are also dynamic.

I’m not sure exactly what you’re intending to do, but if you want to look at the raw MySQL data phpmyadmin is under “/phpmyadmin” (root password is “frcrules”).

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does it work on vista?

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it should seeing as it’s built off xampp

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It should absolutely work on vista (unfortunately I didn’t have a vista system handy to test it on). The only problem you might run into is administrator privileges; to play it safe you can just run everything as administrator.

12

Team 93 used a similar system in 2009 but haven’t used it since for one reason. Power availability/reliability, or rather the lack thereof of it. While it might have just been the crappy laptops (and batteries) we were using, just make sure that you can use it all throughout the day, because having 6 guys (or girls) sitting around doing nothing, or very little or very inefficiently(as in filling out the paper forms we were using at the time), is not very good (or fun for that matter).

Just so you know…

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