Check out the Beantown Blitz online on Saturday, May 22nd!
Hi all,
The Blue Alliance team is working over the summer on the next version of The Blue Alliance site, which will be the forth major revision to the codebase. This update, if things go as planned, will be a near complete rewrite of the site, incorporating what we’ve learned about providing high quality up to the minute data and scaling to tens of thousands of videos of FIRST Robotics Competition matches.
We would like to know what features you think it is important for The Blue Alliance to offer. We are going to continue to provide the great match results and video archives we have always offered, but we think there are other exciting possibilities for The Blue Alliance to best serve teams. We want to help you relieve your greatest matches and show parents and sponsors what FIRST is really enabling.
As a quick aside, this redesign is going to be completely open sourced from the ground floor. As soon as we’ve got the basic functionality together, we are going to publish the code to a Github repository so you can yell at us for sloppy code style, publish back bug fixes, and contribute new features to the site. We think there are a lot of great software initiatives going on in the FIRST community, and we want to make sure what we have made is open for others to learn from and contribute back to.
Please use this Chief Delphi thread to tell us about what your personal perfect The Blue Alliance would look like, and we will take this feedback into account during our redesign.
Thanks,
-Greg Marra and The Blue Alliance team
We hope you’ve all gotten a chance to relax after an exciting weekend in Atlanta! The Blue Alliance now has footage of the 2010 Championship Einstein Field matches online! If you click the “downloadable” version, you can watch in even higher quality. We’re still working on getting the rest of the Championship online, but hopefully this will tide you over until then!
It’s clear that this year The Blue Alliance has been unable to provide match archives for as many matches as we have in previous years. In particular, the dissolution of SOAP has removed much of the organizing drive behind video archiving at events. Perhaps less teams are recording events because they assume someone else will be and the matches will be available online, but if no one records anything, we can’t offer them.
We would love to open the discussion for ideas. Match videos are great for showing sponsors what their money enables, letting parents who couldn’t come to events see what their children’s long hours at the school were for, and relieving your most exciting matches. As a community, we can do a better job preserving these memories, let’s just figure out how!
Please contribute to the discussion on Chief Delphi.
Thanks!
-Greg Marra
Hello Teams!
With only a week left until the Championship in Atlanta, everyone must be busy making last minute preparations. Whether you’re squeezing the most out of your withholding allowance or trying to figure out what the best restaurants in the CNN Center are, you want to make sure you’ve scoped out your competition at the Championship!
Based on The Blue Alliance’s traffic data, the top five teams to watch out for this year are:
Divisions aren’t out yet, but watch out if one of these teams is on your field!
The Blue Alliance has hundreds of videos of the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition, Breakaway, posted on our site. We want to thank everyone who has worked to record regionals, split videos, and covert them for posting on The Blue Alliance. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without you!
Good luck in Atlanta! Go teams!
-Greg Marra
The Blue Alliance is at the Boston Regional providing a live webcast of the event this weekend! Tune in on Saturday to watch the elimination matches and see the excitement that makes Boston such a great event!
To watch the webcast, visit our Live Webcast page or check out the UStream player below!
Hello teams!
We’re sorry there hasn’t been much video of Breakaway posted on The Blue Alliance. We rely entirely on volunteers sending us video, so if you’re going to a future event and want to archive the video, check out our Video Archiving Instructions.
Luckily, thanks to some awesome help, we’ve gotten videos for two events online so far!
We have some more video in our conversion-and-posting pipeline, so stay tuned for more!
-Greg Marra
Hello teams!
Competition season is here! As was announced on Bill’s Blog, some events are webcasting their competitions this weekend. If you want to tune in, here are some links:
We’ve also got The Blue Alliance automatically pulling in match scores as competitions go on. The Blue Alliance also has photos of some robots, so you can get your scouting on!
The Blue Alliance’s text message match results are back online for Breakaway! Enter an email address or phone text message address to be messaged as your favorite teams’ matches end!
Tom Saxton’s FRC Tracker gets you the latest match results on your iPod Touch or iPhone. You can also use it to check out robot photos from The Blue Alliance.
FRC Spyder offers match results on your Android phone.
Tune in and check out Breakaway! Good luck teams!
Hello Teams!
Regionals are just days away, and if you can’t wait to see how Breakaway is going to play, you’re going to want to watch webcasts of Week 1 events!
Check out the list of 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition Webcasts. More webcasts will be added as things are figured out, so check back!
Also, if you’re going to be archiving match videos at Regional competitions this year, please sign up at the list of 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition Match Archivers so that we can get complete video recordings of this year’s game!
Good luck teams!
-Greg Marra
The Blue Alliance has set up an e-mail address for teams to submit photos of their 2010 robots. By building a complete set of robot photos, The Blue Alliance hopes to make pre-scouting for regionals much easier and more efficient for teams.
To submit a photo of your team or another team’s 2010 robot, send an email to photos+2010@thebluealliance.net. Attach a horizontally oriented photo of your robot named ###.jpg where ### is your team’s number. For instance, if you are team 5462, attach “5462.jpg”, and if you are team 1, attached “1.jpg”. Automated scripts handle downloading and processing the attachments, so it is important you stick to this convention!
Send a photo of your bot to photos+2010@thebluealliance.net and help scouts see just how great of a machine you’ve built!
For example, check out the DiscoBot’s great robot! http://thebluealliance.net/tbatv/team/2587
