Portable spreadsheet scorecard

[goingjag]

My car club has recently completed their concours and once again one of the follow up topics was scoring problems.
Judges scores are added incorrectly and/or numbers are difficult to read.
Even if we could afford it, it isn't practical to expect every judge to tote around a laptop while doing their inspections.

I was wondering if it might be feasible to use several pics to construct some type of rolling spreadsheet. I'm assuming a full screen would be too pricey, but maybe a one line lcd screen could be used and it would scroll through each category and allow input of the score for that category, and store each entry separately.

Once the judge was finished, using a usb connection the info would be downloaded to the registration computer.

Registration already has all info on the car, so it could just be assigned a unique number and those numbers would be uploaded to the judges portable scoresheet.

I would expect 25 categories to scroll through for each car, and each category would require a 4 digit input e.g. 98.5.

The categories could be pretty abbreviated since a "cheat sheet" could be given to each judge, but would require some description characters like 1 extpnt 2 intpnt etc. so the judge could be certain of the category.

Does this sound remotely feasible at a reasonable cost, say under $50 each?

My electronics background is almost all analog based hobbiest, however my profession was assembler programmer many many moons ago. So I have eyeballed many of the pic projects but never actually gotten hands on with much in the way of digital construction (other than building my first Sinclair Z80 with tty keyboard and hand wired 64kb memory - showing my age here).

Thanks in advance for any input.

[Engineer1138]

$50 in parts cost each? You might just barely make it.

Once you factor in the development time, though, it becomes much cheaper to just buy a bunch of $300 netbook PCs!

If you can get the system you mention done in less than 80 hours, my hat's off to you. That 80 hours at the low end of the cost of engineering time around here (upper midwest) is going to run you $8,000+ I know you're doing it yourself, but it's just a heads up as to the amount of effort required to do it "right." It could be a fun winter project if you stretch it out for a few months though.

An alternative, if everyone has a Bluetooth cell phone, would be to use the business card transmission feature. The judges scores are entered into a business card template on the phone and then transferred to a single laptop that parses all these "cards" to extract the data and does the computations you need.

Or can you use exam scoring cards where they block out the numbers for scores and put them in a reader?

[goingjag]

Thanks for the reasoned response. I'm not sure I have the patience to do that much development work. I guess I was hoping there might be a spreadsheet chip already out there so I could just interface with that.

I think using a test/grading type card with reader might be too open to input errors by the judges.

Maybe by this time next year netbooks will start showing up on the used market and we can give that a try.

Thanks again for the input.

[Engineer1138]

I built something like this about 15 years ago for judging animal competitions so I had some idea of the effort involved. Back then it was custom designed keypads with serial connections to a base unit. Honestly, if I were to do the same thing again, I'd either go the cheap netbook route or program an iPod Touch etc. as the data collector and upload the data to a PC. The project becomes a lot simpler if you don't also have to design, build and debug the hardware.

Going the netbook/notebook route, I could probably have a usable system in less than a day's work.

[haklesup]

I'd either go the cheap netbook route

Keep an eye out for the refurbished Asus EeePC 900 with 4G SSD and 512M DDR with linux. They can go as low as $154 (they keep coming up on woot.com periodically lately in white or black might have to keep checking for a few weeks till they come up again). With that OS they have WiFi built in and a program to connect to each other. For a little more you might see the same thing with a bit more memory and XP Home (w/ star office or MS works). I got one of each and upgraded the linux one to XP and love it dispite being only slightly limited as compared to a full sized laptop.

There are also a few low cost PDA type devices if you search around you should find some for much less than $100 each retail. Heres a couple really low cost ones but its not clear if it has software suitable for your purpose. At $25 its reasonable to just buy one and try it out. The memo or to-do list functions might be possible to mold to your needs if a predefined template were to be uploaded and edited by the judges then re downloaded, imported to a spreadsheet and macros run. or maybe each contenstat has a business card (contact) entry and the phone or fax fields can be used to score
http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/3 ... m_vc=c5302
http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/5 ... 1MB-Touch/