Devices

In the most ideal scouting setup, your team would want 7 iPads:

1. 3 tablets for scouting the Red Alliance, labeled Red 1, Red 2, and Red 3
2. 3 tablets for scouting the Blue Alliance, labeled Blue 1, Blue 2, and Blue 3
3. (optional) 1 “master” tablet for collecting data and exporting it to Google Sheets.

Why not use one of the scouting tablets as the master?

While a 7th tablet is not absolutely necessary, it comes in very handy in some circumstances. For example, it can leave the stands while matches are going on. At many of the competitions that our team has been to, the WiFi is either not great or absent. In these cases, you may need to relocate to another part of the building in order to get a signal. If you are using one of the 6 scouting tablets as a master, you would miss one or more matches while the user goes to find a stable Internet connection.

Initial Team Setup

On each tablet, review the Settings tab and make sure that the following are set correctly:

• Choose the appropriate league, either FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) or FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC)
• Enter your team number
• Select the season. This should default to the current year, but you may choose a past year if you would like to test out an old scouting form.
• Enter the initials (or name) of the person doing the scouting.

Update the Match Data Right Before Matches Start

Crowd Scout retrieves its event and match data from either the FRC Event API or the FTC Event API.

Crowd Scout will normally cache the event data so that it can operate without an Internet connection most of the time. However, the actual match data is not usually available until after robot inspections are done and event staff are confident that all teams have checked in. Once the match schedule is available, you will need to connect all the tablets to the Internet and then “pull to refresh” on the Event list. If you’ve never done this on a devide, drag your finger on the list until a spinner appears at the top and then lift your finger. This will force CrowdScout to refresh its data.

While you are still online, you should also tap the event you want to scout and ensure that the data is available. Once you see the match listings, you shouldn’t need an Internet connection for the rest of the event.

Note: The events that appear here are the ones that FIRST has your team registered for. If you don’t see an event you expect, please check the appropriate FIRST event website.

What do I do if no match data is available?

Our team has been at FRC events where there were technical problems that prevented the event staff from uploading the match schedule to FIRST’s system for several hours. While this is certainly less than ideal, the workaround that we employed was to create a practice event (using the + in the upper right corner) and then manually entering each match. It’s a lot of extra work, but it can work in a pinch. The downside is that the data you collect in your spreadsheet will be associated with the practice event, so you may need to do some fixing of the data.

Scouting Matches

See Scouting Matches. This has been broken out into a separate section so that your scouts only have to read one page, because sometimes your volun-told scouts are not super enthusiastic about it.

Collecting Data to a Central Tablet

As the scouts watch matches and make reports, this will generate records on each individual tablet. Each scouting tablet generally only contains the records for the matches it was used for. You’re going to want to collect all the records in one place so that it can be sent somewhere to be analyzed. This is where the “central” tablet comes in.

You should designate one tablet as the “central”. It can be any tablet with CrowdScout on it, including one of the ones normally used for scouting. As described above, though, it’s more convenient to have a dedicated device for this. To designate a tablet as central, just select “Central” on the Sharing tab. All the other tablets should be set to “Peripheral”. These names are directly related to the roles in the Bluetooth LE protocol. A device in the “central” role is the that initiates connections, while a “peripheral” waits for incoming requests.

Periodically throughout the competition, someone should go to the Sharing tab and tap the “Start Sync” button. This will bring up a list of all the tablets within range that share the same team number as the central. The person operating the central tablet will need to be within Bluetooth range of the tablets, but, generally, if your team is sitting in a loose cluster in the stands, that should be fine.

1. Tap each of the tablets you would like to collect data from. The icon will light up when it is selected.
2. Tap the “Sync” button

What if I don’t see the tablets I’m expecting?

• Make sure the team number is set correctly
• Maybe decrease the distance
• Ask the scout to restart CrowdScout on their tablet

It’s a good idea to test everything out before you go to a competition. We have encountered issues where a perticular iPad’s Bluetooth stack just wouldn’t work.

Sending Data to Google Sheets

Choosing a Target Worksheet

Before you can send data, you must authorize CrowdScout to write to a selected Google Sheets document.

The steps are:

1. Choose the “Spreadsheet” row. This will present a file chooser for Google Drive.
2. Choose “Continue” when the prompted for “CrowdScout” wants to use “google.com” to sign in
3. Google may prompt you to sign in if you are not already
4. You will be presented with a page requesting access for CrowdScout to access your file. Note: This does not give CrowdScout permission to write to any file; only the very specific file that you choose.
5. After clicking “Allow Access”, you will be presented with a file picker from Google. You can search or browse for the file you want to send data to.
6. Select the file and choose “Insert” (Not sure why Google labeled it “Insert”)
7. The title of the selected spreadsheet will appear on the ‘Spreadsheet’ line
8. Click on the ‘Sheet Name’ row and it will present you with a list of sheets in the tareget spreadsheet. Please choose one
9. Once a sheet is chosen, a button labeled Update Sheet will appear.

Updating the Spreadsheet

Once connected, you may click Update Sheet whenever you would like and the app will send data to the selected sheet / tab. Because Google Sheets is an Internet-based service, you will need to be connected to the Internet while the update is being sent.

Update Behavior

The update uses the first column in the sheet to uniquely identify a particular match record.

• If the update process finds a matching record to one that it has locally, it will update the row.
• If the update process does not find a matching record, it will add a new row at the bottom of the data.

It’s important to note that it does not modify rows that don’t match one that the app has locally. This was done specifically to support a particular style of scouting. If you have scouts that are phyisically distant from each other, say, watching a live feed at home, you can connect all the tablets to a single spreadsheet. While each tablet may only contain a subset of the records, they can upload their portion into a shared spreadsheet.

Exporting Data to a CSV File