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.
Check them out at http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/?year=2010 .
If anyone spots any errors that were made, be sure to let us know at contact@thebluealliance.net.
Enjoy!
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!
Check them out!
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:
Video from the Einstein field will be online here once we have it.
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.
- Reach a broad audience during community outreach.
See the flyer:
http://5thgearsim.googlegroups.com/web/5th+Gear+Flyer.pdf
See 5th Gear in action:
http://www.youtube.com/lachoneus21
Download 5th Gear:
http://thinktank.wpi.edu/articles/141
Discuss 5th Gear:
http://forums.usfirst.org/forumdisplay.php?f=1091
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
As long as you’re at it, don’t forget to check out archived video from regional competitions. Only two weeks to go! Go teams!
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!
With 4 weeks behind us, competition is really starting to heat up with Lunacy! If you want to scout for an upcoming competition or recap your team’s performance, check out these events with video currently online:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
You no longer need to see internal database “eventid”s and “matchid”s floating around on The Blue Alliance anymore. You can access events and matches directly by using logically constructed names for them:
Now you can guess the URL for any page on The Blue Alliance! The error pages if you guess wrong need some work, but that’ll get improved. Old URLs work as well, so any links you had from before will still work.
Please let us know if you run into any errors or have any ideas on how to improve this!
MAKE magazine has launched a new fundraising program for FIRST Robotics teams. Learn more about it on their blog.
Here’s how it works:
At the NYC FIRST Robotics Competition this past weekend, we launched an exciting new program to allow FIRST robot teams, and any other group or club, to raise funds by selling subscriptions to MAKE. Here’s how it works:
- You email your contact information to makemoney@makezine.com (see details on the card above).
- We send your group a fundraising kit with subscription forms.
- You return the forms and subscription payments to us.
- We send you back a monthly check for 50% of all your sales.
Your team or club gets $17 for every subscription sold! And as an added incentive, the top team salesperson gets a $50 Maker Shed Gift Certificate!
We’re really excited by this. We think it’s a great way to capitalize worthy tech, science, civic, and social organizations, while expanding our subscriber base. If you participate, please tell us about your team/club/group in the comments and how much money you were able to raise.
Check out MAKE’s page about this fundraiser, and see if it’s a good fit for your team!
Also, don’t forget about IFI’s Hexbug fundraiser program!
Ever wished you could stay on top of your favorite teams’ performances at Regionals, but had to go to work or class? Been stuck back in the pits, and wished there was an easier way to keep up with match results than going up to the scoring screen every few minutes?
The Blue Alliance is debuting a text message match notification system that will automatically text you match results for your favorite teams. Go to The Blue Alliance Notifications page, and sign up with either an e-mail address, or your phone’s e-mail to sms gateway address. The Blue Alliance updates match information every several minutes, and when we learn about match results for a team you care about, we’ll send you a text message or e-mail!
Take caution - if something breaks on FIRST or TBA’s end, you could get a lot of these notifications. It hasn’t happened before, but be aware.
If you want ongoing match results, check out TBA Notifications.
