We’ve rolled out a few site improvements today that ought to help you use The Blue Alliance this season. Nothing is major, but hopefully you’ll like the changes!
Google Custom Search lets you search The Blue Alliance for teams, events, and matches.
Now tell you dates on which future events occur if no matches available.
Sidebar reorganization.
Redone META description tags should result in better search engine snippets for pages.
Changed team badge link target to be our new, prettier URLs.
Breakaway is upon us! We look forward to seeing what teams come up with to play 2010’s FIRST Robotics Competition game. We’ll be making some improvements around The Blue Alliance site over the next few weeks in preparation for competition season. See you at the competitions!
Hope everyone has had happy holidays! It’s always a nice time of year to relax with the people who are special to you. Now that you’re all rested up, only a few days left until the Kickoff Event!
We just finished off importing FIRST’s 2010 team data. Now when you look up your team or another team on The Blue Alliance, you’ll see their Team Name and Nickname from this year.
We get this information from FIRST’s Team Information Management System, so if any information is inaccurate, make sure you have your Team Contact update it on FIRST’s site.
After a bit of a delay caused by some changes FIRST made to the layout of their site, The Blue Alliance has posted all of the 2010 FRC Regional events, along with the current list of teams attending each one. The team attendance lists on TBA will update daily, but FIRST is still the definitive source for attendees.
We just added 2003 and 2004 match results to The Blue Alliance! That brings the total number of match results online to 24,599! Thanks to Nick Galotti for his help retrieving these old results!
Now that we’re all back from Atlanta, it might be time to take it easy on robotics for a while. Then again, you might want to relive all the action that went down this weekend. Courtesy of SOAP, we’ve got video from all four divisions online. We’re still waiting on Einstein, but here are the other four fields:
Another competition season is now behind us! There were some amazing robots in Atlanta; everyone should be proud of what they have learned and accomplished this year! Go teams!
We have an announcement about 5th Gear at the FIRST Championship in Atlanta!
After appearing at 13 FRC Regionals, Lockheed Martin is sponsoring the 3d Lunacy Match Simulator 5th Gear at the 2009 FIRST Championships. Using 5th Gear, 6 players use XBox controllers to collect Lunacy moon rocks, charge Lunacy super cells, and shoot or dump both into their opponents’ trailers!
Make sure to stop by the 5th Gear exhibit, which will located north of the FTC pit area, near the FRC Pits, on the north side of GWCC Hall C. Take a turn just for fun, or compete in one of our tournaments to see if you will be the 2009 5th Gear virtual champions (and win prizes)! Also, make sure to participate in the survey put out for the WPI Virtual Competition study to help shape the future of 5th Gear offerings.
If you aren’t attending the championships, never fear: 5th Gear is available as a free download. See the link below.
5th Gear – What is it?
An analysis and training tool useful throughout your entire FRC season.
Available to the students as a free download.
Interactively learn and analyze each year’s FRC challenge.
Test and refine your strategies before your robot is completed.
Practice driving and coaching; analyze technique by watching replays.
Convey FRC’s excitement and fun during recruiting.
The FIRST Robotics Competition Championship Event in Atlanta, Georgia is coming up quickly! Every year, FIRST divides the hundreds of teams attending into four divisions: Archimedes, Curio, Galileo, and Newton, where teams duke it out for a chance to play on the World Championship field - Einstein.
The Blue Alliance has brought back out our Championship division prediction generator for the 2009 FIRST Robotics Championship. While these are not the official divisions, FIRST has used the same sorting algorithm to divide the teams attending the Championship into divisions for the last few years. If you want to try to get a head start on scouting before FIRST officially announces the divisions, check out the link below
The Blue Alliance has been posting match results since last year on Twitter. Previously, we have used the username @thebluealliance to tweet these match results. We also used this username to tweet when we were liveblogging events and to make announcements.
The volume of tweets for match results completely ruins the signal to noise ratio for those non-match result posts. From today onward, match results will be tweeted as @tbamatchresults. If you want news about The Blue Alliance, follow @thebluealliance. If you want match results, follow @tbamatchresults.
We hope this will make everything a bit more organized!
