The Blue Alliance Blog

Unanticipated Maintainance

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Logomotion Videos Online!

As week 3 of Logomotion is wrapping up, we’ve got our first batch of videos online! Check out these competitions and get your scouting on for the rest of the season!

• Traverse City
• Granite State
• San Diego

If you have more videos from 2011 events, please reach out to us and we’ll coordinate getting them online.

Go Teams!

Learning from the Past

One of The Blue Alliance’s goals is to help teams relive past competitions. It’s great to go back and watch your teams’ successes or to share videos with parents and sponsors. However, what about other teams?

It looks like a lot of folks are coming to The Blue Alliance to scout out ideas for their 2011 robots. Since Logomotion involves handling inflatable tubes, people are checking out robots from the 2007 game, Rack N’ Roll.

Top Visited 2007 Teams
• Team 233
• Team 254
• Team 1114
• Team 71
• Team 25
• Team 330
• Team 111
• Team 67
• Team 148
• Team 177

In addition, the finals matches from the 2007 Championship (Einstein, Archimedes, Curie, Galileo, and Newton) are getting a lot of views.

Top Visited 2007 Matches
• Finals Match 3 - 2007 Einstein Field
• Finals Match 1 - 2007 Einstein Field
• Finals Match 2 - 2007 Einstein Field
• Semis 1 Match 2 - 2007 Einstein Field
• Semis 2 Match 2 - 2007 Einstein Field
• Quals Match 85 - 2007 Newton Division

Hopefully this reflection on past robots means we’re going to see some unbelievably awesome robots this year. Tubes, watch out!

Go Teams!
-Greg Marra

Site Redesign Beta

We’ve launched a beta test of the new The Blue Alliance site. The old site (“dot net”) is still right where it always was, but the new site (“dot com”) is up and running.

In the next week or two, we’ll be tightening up issues we find with the new site, then phasing out the old one. We’ve still got some work to do to keep some feature (like Chief Delphi signature banners) up and running, but let us know what you think of this new site! If you find anything that doesn’t seem quite right, please report the issues here.

Go Teams!

Redesign Sneak Peak

While you’ve been busy designing robots to play the Logomotion game, we’ve been busy redesign The Blue Alliance website for 2011. The new website is entirely rebuilt from the ground up, making it easier to maintain and add new features. We’re moving into the cloud, powering our site with Google App Engine, and relying on hosting from DotBlock Cloud VPS to host our video files (all 202 GB of them!).

We’ll be launching the site in the next few weeks, but visit our Facebook Page for a sneak peak of the new site! Things aren’t totally finalized, so leave feedback about what you want to see!

Go teams!

Logomotion 2011 FIRST Robotics Game Animation

We look forward to seeing what teams come up with to play the 2011 FIRST Robotics Competition game, Logomotion.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank DotBlock Cloud Hosting for generously hosting The Blue Alliance’s website. Without them, we would not be able to bring you the match videos we do every year. If you are looking for a virtual private server host, give DotBlock a try starting from just $35 per month!

We are still working on improvements to The Blue Alliance for the 2011 season, so event information is not online yet. Progress has been somewhat slower than anticipated, but we are moving forward. If anyone would like to get involved as a developer on the project, please contact us at contact@thebluealliance.net.

Good luck this year everyone! We cannot wait to see you at the competitions!

TBA on Github

As The Blue Alliance moves forward with TBAv4, we have decided to do our development out of a public source code repository. You can check out the current version of the TBAv4 source on the Github page for The Blue Alliance.

The way Github works, you can pull down a copy of the code, and send back patches to be integrated with the master copy. For more information about Git and Github, visit Github’s help page.

Basically, there are a few goals for this initiative:

• Let anyone who wants to see the entire guts of a web site. Most of us behind TBA developed our interest in web development in high school, and we hope other people can be inspired to poke and tinker.
• Let other people contibute code, since we don’t have infinite resources to make everything as awesome as it could be.

There’s not much there yet, but development will continue over the coming months until Kickoff!

-Greg Marra

Brainstorm - The Blue Alliance v4

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