The Blue Alliance Blog

2013 Kickoff Live

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:33:02 -0400

2013 Kickoff Live:

Join us to watch the 2013 FIRST Robotics Kickoff and learn what this year’s game will be. Will it finally be a water game?

RSVP to Kickoff on Facebook

Visit www.thebluealliance.com during the Kickoff to watch and discuss live!

Tell us about YouTube videos

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:03:26 -0400

Tell us about YouTube videos:

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!

Unanticipated Maintainance

Mon, 23 May 2011 02:54:40 -0400

Video playback is disabled while we debug a flaky hard drive. Sorry for the inconvenience :(

2011 Boston Regional Webcast

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 08:41:06 -0400

2011 Boston Regional Webcast:

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.

Check out the link above!

Logomotion Videos Online!

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 17:27:10 -0400

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!

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

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 03:59:16 -0500

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

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

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

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 03:30:50 -0500

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.

www.thebluealliance.com

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

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 21:43:48 -0500

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

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 14:25:01 -0500

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

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:24:02 -0400

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

Beantown Blitz 2010 Webcast

Fri, 21 May 2010 17:07:30 -0400

Beantown Blitz 2010 Webcast:

Check out the Beantown Blitz online on Saturday, May 22nd!

Brainstorm - The Blue Alliance v4

Thu, 20 May 2010 15:41:12 -0400

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

2010 Einstein Videos

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:18:49 -0400

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!

Comprehensive Video Archiving

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:54:50 -0400

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

Video Scouting for the Championship

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:17:35 -0400

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

Boston Regional Webcast

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 23:34:13 -0400

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!

2010 Match Videos Online!

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:25:17 -0400

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

Week 1 Webcasts

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:07:49 -0500

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:

Webcasts

Match Results

On the Web

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!

Via Text Message or Email

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!

On your iPod/iPhone

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.

On your Android Phone

FRC Spyder offers match results on your Android phone.

Have Fun!

Tune in and check out Breakaway! Good luck teams!

Webcasts of 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:55:30 -0500

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

2010 Robot Photos

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:46:14 -0500

Show Your Bot Off on TBA!

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