This year, you can help us out by telling us about YouTube videos of matches. We’ll pull the videos from this spreadsheet and put them on The Blue Alliance. If you’re recording matches, stick them on YouTube, then tell us about them. If you find matches we’re missing, tell us about them.
Thanks to your help, we’ve posted almost 500 videos this way so far this year!
Opening ceremonies for the 2011 Boston Regional start in seven minutes! The Blue Alliance is there webcasting and archiving all of the action so you can follow along even if you aren’t there. Check it out on our UStream.tv channel, and special thanks to Brittany Strachota and Daniel Bathgate for their help in getting it running.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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!