View Full Version : Brainstorm - The Blue Alliance v4
Greg Marra
20-05-2010, 15:37
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 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
Personally, I'd like to see TBA list awards for teams, in addition to match results.
A match rating system would be great, too: 1-5 stars, 5 means a really exciting, really close match; 1 means that it's a not-really-one-you-want-to-show-someone.
Would there be a way to get the pre-penalty scores, in addition to the final ones?
BrianT103
20-05-2010, 15:54
1. Collaborate with 1114 and integrate their excel scouting database into the new website.
2. Provide a profile information page in which teams can talk about the details of their robot (drivetrain setup, end effector, etc.). This would eliminate the need for pit scouting.
AdamHeard
20-05-2010, 15:59
My advice is pretty petty, but it'd be really cool if when you use the search bar on the right of any page, and enter a team number, it goes right to that team number's page. Usually the team's page is the first result, but I've noticed it isn't always.
Tom Line
20-05-2010, 16:00
When I go to a particular team, I'd like to see a button next to each match that says "Add a video".
Generally, my use of Blue Alliance is limited to going to www.thebluealliance.net, then typing in a team number. On numerous occasions I know there are youtube videos of a given match, but there is no obvious way to add the video.
For instance, I know that there are youtube videos from our team for various State Champ matches. How the heck do I attach them to our matches on blue alliance, or suggest they get attached?
For instance, I know that there are youtube videos from our team for various State Champ matches. How the heck do I attach them to our matches on blue alliance, or suggest they get attached?
I would have like a "add a video" button for matches that don't have videos, then the page would prompt you if you would like to upload a video or link to a video sharing site with the video. The first option is preferred, but anything is better than nothing.
-Tanner
Tom Bottiglieri
20-05-2010, 16:55
One feature that would be nice is a mode for team demos/presentations. Basically this could be something as simple as a looping playlist of your team's best match videos (automatically generated or user selected), and could be grown to have a full screens worth of content, including photos, team stats, etc.
Robot demos are great, but there will always be down time and confusion over explaining the large scale implementation of the game. Videos help with this problem, but right now it's a bit hard to just pull up a demo's worth of content without having to do some work up front or maintain the presentation.
Chris is me
20-05-2010, 17:02
2. Provide a profile information page in which teams can talk about the details of their robot (drivetrain setup, end effector, etc.). This would eliminate the need for pit scouting.
There's a need for pit scouting? :)
It'd be cool if there was a user-editable field to fill in stuff like penalties, etc. so that if someone knows them they can add them into the database. For some games, user-editable fields for tubes / hurdles / balls scored per alliance would also be cool. Not to be used in any official database or anything, but nice for reference.
Also an automatic "get a free Pinnacle recorder HERE!" would be cool :)
I would include a feature where teams could put a pre-competition video of their robot similar to the picture option because I feel like this last year a lot more teams have videos of their bots before competition than ever before and more and more teams are going to do it in the future and it would be a nice thing to have on that page.
Small pet peeve with the current site: If I am watching, say, 2008 matches, and click a team number in-video, it directs me to that team's 2010 page. Directing these links to the "proper" year would be nice.
And a second vote for the team-editable robot-information page.
delsaner
20-05-2010, 17:23
Some of my thoughts and recommendations have probably been mentioned before, but I'll list them.
1) A list of awards at the end of the competition.
2) More videos and pictures of different teams.
3) Results of some offseason events (BattleCry, IRI, etc.)
4) A mass list of every FIRST team (along with their number, location, etc.) This could link to their TBA page. Think of it as a "Teams Attending" list, but every FIRST team is on the list.
Sorry if these sound like assertive orders. Just thoughts that I personally would like. :)
SavtaKenneth
20-05-2010, 17:37
I'd like to see a summary of all the awards and placement at each competition the team had on their team page. Apart from that it'd be nice to have a seedings page and alliance selection results and order if possible.
I think that a "team comparison" section would be much appreciated. Like, you can compare team #vs#vs# or something like that
Andrew Schreiber
20-05-2010, 17:37
Greg, one of the things I was disappointed in this year was the lack of robot photos. Perhaps if you do decide to offer more in depth analysis you can limit this to people who have submitted a quality picture of THEIR team's robot. I recall SOAP tried this back in 2003 with the release of 111's robot being a SOAP exclusive. Perhaps work with the defending World Champions to release high quality teaser shots to teams that have submitted.
Chris is me
20-05-2010, 18:02
Greg, one of the things I was disappointed in this year was the lack of robot photos. Perhaps if you do decide to offer more in depth analysis you can limit this to people who have submitted a quality picture of THEIR team's robot. I recall SOAP tried this back in 2003 with the release of 111's robot being a SOAP exclusive. Perhaps work with the defending World Champions to release high quality teaser shots to teams that have submitted.
If you could not overwrite team submitted photos with blurry pit scouting photos, that'd be ideal as well. Hell, add support for multiple photos as long as there's a complete rewrite.
Stephen Kowski
20-05-2010, 18:48
A match rating system would be great, too: 1-5 stars, 5 means a really exciting, really close match; 1 means that it's a not-really-one-you-want-to-show-someone.
I like this concept, but even something simple as a 'digg' or 'bury' type option would be incredibly useful. Organized by year and week, then maybe overall regardless of year.
Teams 1114/842/etc all have various data. Interfaces and presentation vary heavily, but generally they all collect some basic data. Allowing teams to combine all this data via TBA is a challenge, but could be an opportunity.
TBA is in a unique position to help organize a minimum data standard. This data standard can be developed once the game has been revealed so people designing collection systems have input. Teams can collect whatever else they think is useful, but once the standard is set that's all that will be added to TBA.
Now, even though I am not at an event I can get a pretty good idea of how the team acts on the field if the data is available regardless of who collected it.
For example, Team X in 2010 had a shot accuracy of 25% in their first event, 62% in their second but they took half as many shots so maybe they changed how they played the game.
electron
20-05-2010, 19:05
I think it would be nice to have the ability to comment on the videos posted. just an idea :)
Phoenix Spud
20-05-2010, 19:25
I would like to see it be a combo of the current site and the ideas from TheRedAlliance.net .
Radical Pi
20-05-2010, 19:29
I would like to see the posibility of having 2 videos per match. One would be the "official" video that's taken from the field feed, and another "stands" video, uploaded by teams that recorded every single match with a full view of the field, without the scores feed.
I'd also like to see, if possible, information about what penalties were assessed in the match and possibly to which teams (if applicable). It could be tough, but perhaps FIRST could be lobbied to make that information available
Tom Bottiglieri
20-05-2010, 20:11
I would like to see the posibility of having 2 videos per match. One would be the "official" video that's taken from the field feed, and another "stands" video, uploaded by teams that recorded every single match with a full view of the field, without the scores feed.
How about a one-to-many relationship between matches and videos, where each match could have a variety of admin or user added videos. These could be housed on TBA's servers (the situation today) or linked to from an external source like YouTube or Vimeo. The user experience should be seamless no matter the source.
BrendanB
20-05-2010, 20:59
One thing that I miss from the older site is that when I search for a team number I get a list of team pages not a direct search to a team number like an older version. In some ways it is nice as a regional or alliance partner comes up, but if you search for my team 1519 the number 1 result is team 1058 and alliance partners from this year and I have to go through another teams page to get to ours. I have searched other team numbers and have found the same problem but for most searches the team you want is the first on the list. Additionally a few months ago searching for 1519 showed our 2009 year and not our 2010 year.
I like the idea of having search results, but when it doesn't bring up the team number or current year it kinda annoys me.
But thank you so much for all your hard work put into the site! I have enjoyed watching matches all year round and learning past histories of a team. I don't think you guys get enough credit!
Thank you thebluealliance.net! :)
Integration with the First Wiki?
I think it'd be nice to have higher quality streaming video. I think the easiest solution is to host videos on an external site such as Youtube or Vimeo and embed them (both have support for HD streaming). This could eliminate the issues TBA has been having with lack of server space and make the match watching experience more enjoyable.
I would like to see the posibility of having 2 videos per match. One would be the "official" video that's taken from the field feed, and another "stands" video, uploaded by teams that recorded every single match with a full view of the field, without the scores feed.
I'd also like to see, if possible, information about what penalties were assessed in the match and possibly to which teams (if applicable). It could be tough, but perhaps FIRST could be lobbied to make that information available
Pretty much took my thoughts but I will restate them slihtly differently.
I would really like to see what penalties were assessed to who and why. Is it possible to edit out the waiting period between the end of a match and the announcement of the final score and penalties?
I also love the idea of multiple videos of a single match.
And I would like to see more matches captured on video. Hopefully enough people want this and can help provide you the recordings.
SteveGPage
21-05-2010, 09:37
Here is my wishlist!
1. Support for mobile devices - a "m.thebluealliance.net" or ".mobi" site optimized for smartphones, iPhones, etc...
2. An advanced query function
3. Export data from queries to csv/xls/pdf format
Thanks for all you do!
Steve
Jonathan Norris
21-05-2010, 09:53
I think one of the main things that should be in v4 is killing flash alltogether and going with h.264 and try HTLM5 for the video playback. This will give us better quality output and across the board mobile device compatability. I'm not sure what your server situation is like but we should really build a script that will take the uploaded video files and encode it to a standard, without having to take download it, rename it, encode it, create a jpeg, then reupload it all. That got pretty time consuming...
It could be done using a shell script (maybe some php... not too sure) and Handbrake CLI (or just x264) and ffmpeg to create the screen shot (if still needed). I'd be interested in helping out with this if you have the server side capabilities to do this.
Katie_UPS
21-05-2010, 10:04
Maybe a banner that says "This team is no longer active" when it applies. Its nice to know at a first glance.
Greg Marra
21-05-2010, 17:01
I am loving these suggestions. These are really helpful for us to figure out how to architect the new system to provide the features that will help teams most.
Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!
I am loving these suggestions. These are really helpful for us to figure out how to architect the new system to provide the features that will help teams most.
Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!
One thing I do is send out an email to the team targeted at the new members telling them which teams to watch videos of on thebluealliance.net from past years to learn from their robots and strategies.
I also once to improve my strategy watched a whole regional one match at a time never rewinding and took notes on every team. I put together an alliance selection list and a strategy for the top teams.
In addition I do the traditional watch teams attending our events and the best teams in the nation.
BradMello
21-05-2010, 17:52
Have www.thebluealliance.net/*insertteamnumberhere* link directly to a teams profile
I noticed this year that there was quite a lack of videos; provide somewhere examples of how to record footage, whether it be from the streaming broadcast or directly at the event.
Chris is me
21-05-2010, 17:55
Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!
I'd pull up matches from Newton for 1714's demos sometimes. Video quality wasn't very good since that year's video was ripped from the webcast but it got the job done.
I would have used TBA for scouting but there was very little video this year, so I can't really comment on that.
J93Wagner
21-05-2010, 18:55
I've noticed that while typically the content of the match is good, at least for what i've been looking at, the low quality rivals that of Youtube at times, making what was an awesome match look a lot less awesome...
Alex Cormier
21-05-2010, 20:19
1. Quality of videos...
2. Have a year by year section of just robot photos in numerical order.
3. Bring back the quick search for teams on the right, it was replaced? with a google search.
XaulZan11
21-05-2010, 21:04
One thing that I would like to have is a team's history on all one page. Sometimes I want to see if a team is historically good or not. You could basically have each years events, record and result (not selected, quarterfinalist...). Of course, you can then click on each of these events or years for those videos.
I don't think this has been mentioned but maybe have the final seedings/rankings for each event.
I'm not sure I like having a lot of 'user generated' stuff (robot specifics/pit scouting, user posted videos of pre-ship, scouting data). Unless we can get atleast 80% of the data, I think everything will be so sparse that it would become meaningless and never looked at. In regards to the scouting data, unless I know whose data it is, I would never take any of it seriously.
Thanks again for all the work put into TBA. It has really made scouting super easy the past few years.
rulesall2
21-05-2010, 21:05
I would like to see it be a combo of the current site and the ideas from TheRedAlliance.net .
The only problem I can see here is teams inflating their abilities, which is mainly what happens in pit scouting anyways.
Integration with the First Wiki?
I like this suggestion a bit more, and coupled with an option for teams to upload their own competition photos separate from their official robot photo would be cool too. Teams could post cool robot action shots and really show off their spirit to other teams and potential FIRSTers/sponsors. I think there is a lack of photos that exemplify the excitement of FIRST competitions readily available other than what you can scrounge up off of team's websites and Facebook pages. For organization of the photos, you could integrate almost like a Facebook type tagging system that would make it easy to find photos of your team posted by others.
Any other suggestions? I really like where some of these suggestions are headed, and I would once again like to thank all of the hard working people at TBA.
-Jack
Maybe hop on the HTML5 bandwagon... :-)
Chris is me
21-05-2010, 21:23
A random suggestion: Often I'll go straight to /tbatv/team/xxxx and type the wrong number. This redirects me straight to a tumblr page, which means I have to retype the whole URL to "try again". If you could leave random unassigned teams / events at a 404 type page, that would be much preferred.
Having a place for teams to describe the features of their robot and have multiple robot photos (or videos) would be a huge help in scouting. The bluealliance could become the first place everyone goes when getting ready for a regional. Currently, at least for early regionals, there's not much reason to go to TBA because video hasn't been loaded yet and all you get is a picture of the robot (if that).
The field video feed isn't all that useful in scouting because it hops around so much between robots or pictures of the drivers(!). Having video clips the teams (or others) load of that particular robot in action would be more helpful.
When uploading robot picture(s) it should be possible to send large files and have the site scale them down and rotate them if needed. Often times the robot picture in done in portrait but the site wants landscape as I recall.
Jamie Kalb
21-05-2010, 22:03
Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!
I've used TBA to explain the game challenge (post-season). Often I'll try to explain it with the game animation, but the people I'm explaining to can't visualize actual robots playing it. Then I'll show them a really well-played match from TBA , and they go, "Ohhhhh, that's what it looks like!" Post-season 2009, I showed a lot of people this (http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/match/2009gal_qm42) match. It helped a lot in recruiting for my team.
I've also used TBA during the season to scout teams going into their second regional. It helps a lot to know not just that someone dominated a regional, but how they dominated it.
I <3 TBA! :D Thanks so much Greg and company!
artdutra04
21-05-2010, 22:30
Right now teams post content everywhere, on team sites, Chief Delphi, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Flickr, Picassa... During the competition season trying to find videos or photos of robots is difficult. Most can be found with enough persistence, but it's difficult. The content usually already exists, so a very good feature would be to help get a lot of the external content embedded or linked to from the TBA page.
One initial one would be to upload a photo to CD-Media, and tag it with YYYY robot and frcXXXX, where YYYY is the current year, and XXXX is your team number. Since the photo gets approved to CD, then it's an appropriate photo. This photo can either be an embedded image or a link to CD-Media. Maybe even cache the thumbnail and link to original on CD to avoid bandwidth leeching. This system would replace the current "email to TBA" means for getting team photos on the site, as it would use the the strengths of CD-Media and TBA to complement each other.
Another way would be to add in links to YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, Flickr and/or content on a team's website (URL domain name must match the one listed in FIRST database) for additional videos and photos. I don't really like the idea of "team inputted robot information", as all teams beat their chest and exaggerate their abilities. But photos and videos of robots are harder to fake. It's easier to see if the team's claims are true.
Host official match video in a downloadable format on your server (h.264 or MPEG-4, so they're viewable on mobile devices). Upload the streaming versions of the match videos to YouTube or Vimeo. (Is there a Vimeo iPod/iPhone/iPad app?)
Create a means for user-submitted match videos on YouTube or Vimeo to be added to matches. Provides another point of view, and can help get some video for matches which have no official video recordings.
I've been thinking about using YouTube/Vimeo/Flickr tags or Twitter hashtags to automatically pull in content, but verifying it's authentic and not spam might be difficult. But this would be awesome if some kind of solution is worked out. (Maybe a team can have a specific "whitelist" of specific accounts to look for video/content from?) Maybe this solution can even be extended to matches: tag the match video with the proper naming convention already used for videos on the site, and it'll automatically pull the video into the site.
Sorry if these thoughts seem meandering. Just thinking out loud.
Radical Pi
21-05-2010, 23:04
Perhaps an "official" TBA iPhone/Android/other smartphone app could be made to make everything very mobile-friendly
Or, assuming custom apps are beyond what you're looking to do, at least have a mobile version of the website optimized for small screens and no Flash thanks to Steve Jobs.
Tom Bottiglieri
22-05-2010, 03:51
Or, assuming custom apps are beyond what you're looking to do
Any idea is fine for this discussion. If you have ideas that are not website specific, feel free to throw them down here as well.
Several people have asked for information on raw match scores, penalties, and so forth. This year, that's a relative piece of cake, thanks to the FRCFMS twitter feed. This year, it contains the number of balls scored for each alliance, the number of bonus points, and the number of penalties. From this, it isn't hard to calculate the QPs for each team (except in the rare cases when a team is disqualified and receives 0 QPs) and generate the match rankings. With the scores and penalties available, it should also be pretty simple to calculate OPR and CCWM in real-time.
I've written a little Python script which grabs data from past tweets using the Twitter API. It doesn't do anything with the results yet, but the concept is workable. It's trivial to port to PHP if that's better for integration with TBA. I'd love to see TBA have a listing of world OPR/CCWM rankings, and show it on each team's page.
AlexD744
22-05-2010, 11:14
I basically would like to reiterate on some of the previous points that are most important to me.
1) Bring back the team search on the right that was replaced by the google search.
2) I love the idea of showing what awards a team received for the different events on their page. And the idea of saying this team was "4th seed alliance catian" or "picked 1st by the 7th seed alliance catain."
3) More videos, and any of the ideas stated above that suffice to do that would be fine with be.
MarkoRamius1086
22-05-2010, 12:00
In addition to the points that seem very appealing in post above (team search, awards, and videos), I would like to include a point that Dale mentioned. Having a place for a robot description would be great! If there was a system where we as teams could submit our robot information and picture, and then a BlueAlliance webmaster could simply click "verify" or something, the data could appear underneath the information cells at the top. That way not just the stats of the team are given, but also a capabilities description, and a picture. Pictures are priceless as everyone knows.
Chris is me
22-05-2010, 14:11
Some place on the site (event page?) showing accurate alliance selection order would be nice.
Greg Marra
24-05-2010, 22:18
These are all really great suggestions! Some of them are things we were already thinking about (HTML5, better search, better 404s, user submitted match videos, mobile apps) and some were things that didn't occur to us but sound awesome (CD-Media integration, focus on quick basic info retrieval).
Please keep the ideas coming! We're still very much in the planning phases!
Tom Line
26-05-2010, 18:52
Since you automatically get the information up on the page anyway, it would be neat if you could implement OPR for each year. That OPR could update as the new scores came in.
Likewise, it would be cool if people were able to post webcast links on TBA for given events.
ProgramLuke
10-08-2010, 19:35
Any idea when this new TBA will be operational?
Maybe allow anyone to add content to a team's profile.
I would also really like the site to be much more data oriented. Right now I search for a team number and I get their info, but I also have this really ugly sidebar on the right of the site that contains links to your site.
I don't mean to be rude, but.....
I don't care about The Blue Alliance. In fact, I don't even know what team/who runs it. I only use it to acquire data, so how about replacing the right sidebar full of links with that team's twitter feed, or other useful information.
I'd also LOVE to see a public api so I could write my own scripts to automate some of my team's scouting.
Joe Ross
10-08-2010, 21:32
I'd also LOVE to see a public api so I could write my own scripts to automate some of my team's scouting.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75368
MarkoRamius1086
11-08-2010, 00:23
When will the off season matches (such as IRI and BOB...) be posted on TheBlueAlliance?
Nevets Amstier
11-08-2010, 09:01
Greg-
As to how TBA is used to introduce people to first:
At the start of each new fall semester, Clarkson tries to recruit new college students via the activities fair, followed by a more formal introductory meeting. At this meeting we always start with a more in-depth explanation which is best done by showing match videos from various years, pictures of truly excellent robots, and the game introduction videos.
Suggestions:
1) I think it'd be useful to have a simple page associated with each year that archives the game intro video, with a simple description of the game (scoring methods, penalties, etc..) as well as the teams/people who won NATIONAL recognition (nat'l chairmans, nat'l woodie flowers, Overall Winners, Overall Runner-ups, nat'l autodesk, nat'l safety vid, etc...)
2) I know that this suggestion is way out there seeing as all of you have your own careers/schooling to think about. But I would LOVE to see the return of TBA to the kickoff event. For alot of teams, the way TBA members demonstrated how the game elements behaved, how big they were, descriptions of texture, etc... were unbelievabley helpful.
Thanks!
Andrew Schreiber
11-08-2010, 10:15
Maybe allow anyone to add content to a team's profile.
I would also really like the site to be much more data oriented. Right now I search for a team number and I get their info, but I also have this really ugly sidebar on the right of the site that contains links to your site.
I don't mean to be rude, but.....
I don't care about The Blue Alliance. In fact, I don't even know what team/who runs it. I only use it to acquire data, so how about replacing the right sidebar full of links with that team's twitter feed, or other useful information.
I'd also LOVE to see a public api so I could write my own scripts to automate some of my team's scouting.
Greg, I think you guys need a ticker up at the top. Hours of video served (maybe displayed in days). Hours of video hosted. Calls made to FIRST website. And most importantly, hours of development (Maybe include a rough estimate of the cost if you were to charge for your services. I guess I would call that "useful" information.
Sorry for derailing the thread...
Greg Marra
11-08-2010, 19:41
Greg, I think you guys need a ticker up at the top. Hours of video served (maybe displayed in days). Hours of video hosted. Calls made to FIRST website. And most importantly, hours of development (Maybe include a rough estimate of the cost if you were to charge for your services. I guess I would call that "useful" information.
I think this is valuable feedback. We don't do a good job logging right now in a way that gives us deep insight to people's interaction patterns. We should do a better job and make a public dashboard.
1) I think it'd be useful to have a simple page associated with each year that archives the game intro video, with a simple description of the game (scoring methods, penalties, etc..) as well as the teams/people who won NATIONAL recognition (nat'l chairmans, nat'l woodie flowers, Overall Winners, Overall Runner-ups, nat'l autodesk, nat'l safety vid, etc...)
I like this idea for each year's page. I think a "Welcome to Breakaway" page would be valuable throughout the whole season. Want to know about the 2011 FIRST game? Go to The Blue Alliance.
I don't care about The Blue Alliance. In fact, I don't even know what team/who runs it. I only use it to acquire data, so how about replacing the right sidebar full of links with that team's twitter feed, or other useful information.
I'd also LOVE to see a public api so I could write my own scripts to automate some of my team's scouting.
You are right that the right hand sidebar isn't very useful. It does link to the Developer API (http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/TBA_API).
Since you automatically get the information up on the page anyway, it would be neat if you could implement OPR for each year. That OPR could update as the new scores came in.
Likewise, it would be cool if people were able to post webcast links on TBA for given events.
If someone can write a Python library to calculate OPR scores, it would be much easier for us to implement. How long does running OPR math take? If it's very long, we'll have to think about it harder, but if we can get it to run in under 30 seconds, we can drop it straight in.
Webcast links is an awesome idea that we'll be sure to do.
Any idea when this new TBA will be operational?
I think we'll have something people can play with by the end of October. In an ideal world, we'd have the basic site good to go by 2011 and mobile apps good to go by ship day. Unfortunately, we're dramatically understaffed.
Thanks for all your thoughts and ideas!
-Greg
...mobile apps good to go by ship day.You might already know about this, but PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com/) provides a nice way to write the code for mobile apps once and have it work on Android/iPhone/Blackberry/webOs/etc rather than re-writing code for each platform (That and you write the code in HTML/CSS/JS).
You are right that the right hand sidebar isn't very useful. It does link to the Developer API.
Lol, didn't even see it there. That just proves my point though. The sidebar just takes up space rather than providing useful features.
Brandon_L
13-08-2010, 17:12
Haven't read any of the suggestions yet, but seeing the topic reminded me of an old idea I had. What about a contact team button? or something along the lines. Things like emails or phone numbers.
Haven't read any of the suggestions yet, but seeing the topic reminded me of an old idea I had. What about a contact team button? or something along the lines. Things like emails or phone numbers.
That's a really good idea.
I was surfing TBA today, looking up information about teams that I didn't see this year, when I realized something. In the little bracket showing the elimination rounds at each event (which, I love, by the way), the teams are always randomly organized. I would really like it if perhaps the Captain was on top, then the first pick and the second, because there were times where I would say to myself, "Oh! Look, this team made it to the Curie finals!". (for example) But I wouldn't know if they were the Captain or the third pick.
I was surfing TBA today, looking up information about teams that I didn't see this year, when I realized something. In the little bracket showing the elimination rounds at each event (which, I love, by the way), the teams are always randomly organized. I would really like it if perhaps the Captain was on top, then the first pick and the second, because there were times where I would say to myself, "Oh! Look, this team made it to the Curie finals!". (for example) But I wouldn't know if they were the Captain or the third pick.
I always thought the exact same thing, that would be so much better for scouting and for people just wanting to know results
Andrew Schreiber
14-08-2010, 17:28
I always thought the exact same thing, that would be so much better for scouting and for people just wanting to know results
The issue is that currently there is no place to scrape that data from.
Actually there is, the FIRST website and the links to the info for each competition has the final rankings before allaince selection and you can see the final alliance selections and go from there
That works for the captain. Maybe it works for the first pick, if the first pick is also a top-8 team or pretty close. But if neither the first nor the second pick is near the top, there is no way to tell, as it's quite possible that #50 out of 50 is taken before #25 and they're on the same alliance.
Well that is true, never thought of that. You could get team input from teams or people there or from teams or people who watched the webcast
Andrew Schreiber
14-08-2010, 18:17
Well that is true, never thought of that. You could get team input from teams or people there or from teams or people who watched the webcast
The problem with this is that it isn't 100% automated and would add additional workload. Now, what could be done is the captains are bolded (you can always find these out) and the other two are just left normal. You can also determine about the proper ordering slightly higher than 50% of the time because of the likelihood of picking within the top 8. However, this is not accurate enough for my liking.*
*This is all for places outside of Michigan where the data is actually public due to our scoring system.
Chris is me
14-08-2010, 18:35
The problem with this is that it isn't 100% automated and would add additional workload. Now, what could be done is the captains are bolded (you can always find these out) and the other two are just left normal. You can also determine about the proper ordering slightly higher than 50% of the time because of the likelihood of picking within the top 8. However, this is not accurate enough for my liking.*
Just scrape from 1114's database. They do the work anyway, might as well use it.
Any idea when thebluealliance.net will be back up? I'm sure there are teams other than ours who would love to show videos at our callout meetings, as well as research teams for upcoming offseason events.
TBA is a phenomenal resource, and I miss it!
Greg Marra
04-09-2010, 20:22
Any idea when thebluealliance.net will be back up? I'm sure there are teams other than ours who would love to show videos at our callout meetings, as well as research teams for upcoming offseason events.
TBA is a phenomenal resource, and I miss it!
Our server went down, and has since been rebooted and functioning again. :)
OverdriveAdge
07-12-2010, 19:06
Would it be possible to add FTC and maybe even FLL teams to the database?
MarkoRamius1086
07-12-2010, 19:09
That and off-season events from this past year. From what I can tell IRI has been in the books for awhile, but not this past year.
$0.02
BrendanB
07-12-2010, 19:16
Would it be possible to add FTC and maybe even FLL teams to the database?
FTC seems reasonable, but FLL teams change every year which would make the upkeep harder.
MarkoRamius1086
08-12-2010, 09:51
FTC seems reasonable, but FLL teams change every year which would make the upkeep harder.
Very good point, considering theres upward of 17,000 FLL teams in the world, and they re-register every year. I can only name two or three teams in Virginia that have kept their names over a number of years, two out of approximately 500 (VA/DC FLL is the largest FLL Region in the world, with the State Tournament hosting 97 Teams!:D ). This plus the fact that coaches and members cycle dynamically over the years.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5203/5292036408_662361a5f3.jpg
Team Heatmap in the continental US:
Generated using TBA API and Google Maps.
Unfortunately takes about 5 minutes to load all the lat/long's from google....
I am going to store all of them for my own use, but i think others may find this useful from the API stand point.
also throwing up a crossdomain.xml file so as3 applications can utilize the api.
(right now I'm using a java backend to make calls to the api, I would much rather do this client side)
Chris is me
25-12-2010, 21:12
I think you're map is a little shifted. I imagine those heat clusters about an hour northwest of Milwaukee and Chicago are intended for the cities...
Justin Montois
25-12-2010, 22:12
I think you're map is a little shifted. I imagine those heat clusters about an hour northwest of Milwaukee and Chicago are intended for the cities...
Agreed. It's a really cool map, I see the heat cluster for Rochester is in the middle of Lake Ontario though.
I think you're map is a little shifted. I imagine those heat clusters about an hour northwest of Milwaukee and Chicago are intended for the cities...
yeah I noticed the same. the code for the heatmap generation wasn't mine.
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2010/09/creating-heat-map-with-flash-api.html
as the feature itself was a delighter (idea came from call of duty's heatmap) and a non-critical feature, I figured the shift didn't take away from the effect I wanted it to have :) I will try to fix the bug, but the next thing I wanted to look at was the total point spread for each team in 2010.
A previous poster mentioned that comparisons would be nice, right now I am trying to make a reputation engine based on the TBA info.
Another map I wanted to generate was that of rookie teams, showing which areas have the most growth.
Update:
Generated the rookie map, way to go Dallas and Salt Lake City!
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5161/5291635965_033413b3ee.jpg
And I want to say thanks to TBA for opening this information in an API.
Maybe this is an issue with the TBA API, but there don't seem to be any teams in Seattle. I know some XBots and Skunks who would be disappointed with their lack of existence.;)
Maybe this is an issue with the TBA API, but there don't seem to be any teams in Seattle. I know some XBots and Skunks who would be disappointed with their lack of existence.;)
They are in the api. It could be an issue with google, they only allow so many calls, and they tend to reject some of mine.
Also, the way I am accessing the api is through my backend so it may be getting corrupted there.
Again this was one day of coding to produce this, it seems CD is a great bug tracking source :)
Edit:
I confirmed that google is rejecting some of my calls, pretty much every team from a state after South Carolina (alphabetical order). Once I store the lat/long on the backend this should be fixed
Once again if TBA added the lat/longs, no one else would have this issue. Also when trying to pull teams, rather than calling "getTeams()" a teamnumber range function would be nice, an alternative to going from state to state.
Update:
fixed the alignment problem
here's the rookie map
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5282/5292316114_9106a1d400.jpg
maverickfan138
26-12-2010, 23:05
So does anybody have any idea when the new version of TBA will be completed?
goffchris
30-12-2010, 17:13
How about a system of user ratings? Kind of like the stars on Amazon. Perhaps there could be a rating system for things that are not reflected in the official stats. For example, Teamwork, Robot reliability, Gracious Professionalism, etc.
Andrew Schreiber
30-12-2010, 17:27
They are in the api. It could be an issue with google, they only allow so many calls, and they tend to reject some of mine.
Also, the way I am accessing the api is through my backend so it may be getting corrupted there.
Again this was one day of coding to produce this, it seems CD is a great bug tracking source :)
Edit:
I confirmed that google is rejecting some of my calls, pretty much every team from a state after South Carolina (alphabetical order). Once I store the lat/long on the backend this should be fixed
Once again if TBA added the lat/longs, no one else would have this issue. Also when trying to pull teams, rather than calling "getTeams()" a teamnumber range function would be nice, an alternative to going from state to state.
Update:
fixed the alignment problem
here's the rookie map
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5282/5292316114_9106a1d400.jpg
I have a file that contains all the teams from 1992-2010 geocoded. I attached it. I assume you are generating this from a language that can handle json.
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