The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

The Blue Alliance is going to be entering its third year of operation this season. We started the website back in the fall of 2006 to produce tutorial videos, then added the Match Archives during the 2007 season. The website has gotten a lot more useful (and prettier!) over these two years, and we're still trying to improve things further.

To this extent, I feel like it would be very useful to involve the community more tightly with going-ons with The Blue Alliance. There are a lot of smart people with a lot of great ideas that read these forums, and if we could figure out some way to tap into that, we could make The Blue Alliance more useful for everyone who participates in FIRST.

One of the most immediate ways we're thinking about is opening the website redesign we have planned for this fall to the community. If everyone works together to fix the UI issues the current site has, we could wind up with a new TBA site that is a total breeze to use.

What do you think are the best ways to enable people to contribute to TBA? What skills, knowledge, or passion would you be willing to contribute to the community?

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

The site is already great!! The one improvement is somehthing more could help with and that's getting more match video up. The two regionals we attended last year were not included in the archives. :( This is exceptionaly sad because last year's Palmeto Regional I think set a record for the most matches played to decide the champion. There were two ties in the final alone!

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

As long as there is a decent quality control process in place for any community additions, it sounds like a great idea.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

i didnt find out about it until after the season, but if you could get the match result e-mails to work, that would be great

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I wish someone would make a recorder that triggered off of the match start and would then record the next 5 minutes. This would auto parse the match footage and thus require less edit time to get video on the blue alliance. Pinancle has that nice straight to hard-drive recorder. If it could be triggered off of a match controller system, that would be awesome.

TBA does an awesome job. We just need to do a better job feeding it.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I can design in asp.net 2.0 w/VB code , and SQL if this is of any help.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

One thing I'd like to see is the score screen at the end of each video (and complete videos... sometimes the parser cuts off the very end (ex. IRI, final match)).

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I wonder if we could get FIRST to give us access to start, stop, match aborted, and score up signals for a match that could be read using a serial port or something similar. That would make a recorder easier to write and very powerful.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I personally think that the site is great as it already is.

Just like others have already said, have videos for all matches and have the FINAL score of the matches as some might have what it was throughout the game and not the final after peneltys and such.

Maybe have people help in making thier own torturials as those seem to of stopped, at least since the last time I looked, or submit ideas for them.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I'm not sure how much support FIRST has given, but I definitely think with the amount that we pay to attend regionals, some sort of funding/technical support should be used for this effort.
TBA has proven to be an effective way to document match footage and I'm sure hundreds use this site.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

can you get the allianvce selection video on there?

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I will be testing the Pinnacle Setup at Kettering Kick-off, I am going to work with the Video Mixer Technician and have them start the recording just before the teams are announced and then stop after they show the final score of the matches. That way all of the matches are already separated. I would also like to get the alliance selections and award ceremonies as well.

The setup is fairly simple and takes up minimal space. The Pinnacle recorder actually powers the usb portable hard drive, so only one power cable is needed.

If you would like to see the setup at Kettering, feel free to find me in the pits.

-Clinton-
EngiNERDs - Team 2337

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

I will send Jim Z. your way. Thanks. I have been planning on buying one of these.

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

Shouldn't be too hard to do that; SOAP has at least some of those. (Then again, SOAP doesn't have a lot from 2008, last I checked.)

Re: The Blue Alliance and the Community
 

It would be really cool if The Blue Alliance turned into the FIRST Encyclopedia way beyond what it is today. Taking all the info from team logos, robot history, parts catologs, everything that would be described into a powerful resource.

I'd also like to see TBA turn into SportsCenter for FIRST. Lots of talking to other teams about their progress and letting other teams know with a type of FIRST news series. Large discussions on how to best play the FIRST game, What teams have been able to accomplish in the game.