[BB] Announcing the Beta Testers
 

Good Morning Teams,

Thank you to everyone who applied to be a Beta Test Team. There were a lot of strong candidates; unfortunately, we weren’t able to accommodate all of you. Emails were sent this morning to everyone who applied, now I can share the list with you.

Testing C/C++
151 Tough Techs
179 The Children of the Swamp
188 Woburn Robotics
1158 Eagle Corps
1334 Red Devils
1511 Rolling Thunder
1714 MORE Robotics
1730 Team Driven
1816 The Green Machine
1946 AFR

Testing Java
20 The Rocketeers
67 HOT Team
294 Beach Cities Robotics
339 Kilroy
341 Miss Daisy
399 Eagle Robotics
624 CRyptonite
811 The Cardinals
957 SWARM
1073 The Force Team
1089 Team Mercury
1123 Autodidactic Intelligent Minors (AIM)
1160 FireBird Robotics
1279 ColdFusion
1421 Team Chaos
1557 12 Volt Bolt
1777 Viking Robotics
1852 Amore
2974 Team WALT
3006 West High FIRST Robotics

Testing LabVIEW
45 TechnoKats Robotics Team
103 Cybersonics
115 Monta Vista Robotics Team
122 Nasa Knights
330 BeachBot
441 Devil Dogs
488 Team Xbot
812 The Midnight Mechanics
1577 SteamPunk
1629 GaCo
1718 The Fighting Pi
1746 Forsyth Alliance
1912 Team Combustion

The Beta teams will receive directions and copies of the new software once they sign the 2010 Disclosure agreements. Some of these Beta teams will be tapped to test hardware as soon as the elements become available. You can follow the Beta Teams’ progress and ask questions here.

127 days until the 2010 Kickoff
See you there!

Re: [BB] Announcing the Beta Testers
 

Congrats to those on the list!


Sigh. 2502 nowhere to be seen. :cool:
At least 1816 is close by!

Re: [BB] Announcing the Beta Testers
 

Interesting ... that was posted to the blog before the email was sent out (which I just got 10 seconds ago...)

Congrats to the teams. Glad to see alot of last year's Beta testers return.

Re: [BB] Announcing the Beta Testers
 

Wohoo. Nice to see 1746 got the beta this year.

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

Team 1816 is very excited to be a Beta Test Team again this year! Good luck to all the Beta testers!

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

I created a map that shows the approximate location of all the beta test teams.

The closest teams seem to be 151, 811, and 1073. 330 and 294 are also very close, and there are 3 other beta test teams within a 2 hour drive. There are also 4 teams pretty close in eastern PA and NJ.

California has the most teams, 6, followed by New Hampshire and Virginia, 3.

Only 3 of the teams have won the championship chairmans award, down from 6 last year.

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

Joe, that map is really interesting. The "greens" (Java) seem to be east and west coast, while "blues" (C++) seem more concentrated in the upper mid-section (only US analysis). Wonder why that trend is? (I'm sure it's based on who applied for what, but it's interesting...)

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

Hello from Team 115, many of us are actually really surprised we got it but nevertheless, we'll help FIRST to the best of our abilities.

It's also weird we're the only NorCal team for beta testing...

Good luck to all teams !!

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

Now, which teams get to beta test the hardware?
How many devices will be distributed to the beta teams?

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

All of them.

Probably a complete (beta) driver's station / cRIO / etc, if it's anything like last year. We didn't get to keep them though (we even had to return the jumpers and Ethernet cables!) without paying for all of the non-FRC-legal beta parts.

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

I believe this will be different then last year. Teams already have a cRIO and all the required hardware. Some teams will be asked to test any new hardware (classmate PC, and anything else), and some will only be testing software. They have not said yet how the teams that will test hardware will be selected.

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

*notes down that post as my Bi-Weekly Chief Delphi Mistake*

I'm wondering exactly what software wise we could test without an (accurate) DS for C++ that we otherwise wouldn't know from 2009 build. That is, unless they activate stuff we didn't have access to on the cRIO last year... :D

I guess that means my team's spare cRIO will be shared between a swerve chassis group and a beta group then.

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

The drivers station should not require a huge amount of change on the cRIO side, the change is hopefully transparent
if not, then a trip to the closest team with the new DS may be in order

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

A couple of thoughts:
This year Beta test teams won't have much to test in the way of new hardware, and will be mostly concerned with making sure new and existing libraries work appropriately. I was a bit disappointed with the fact that FRC expects teams to recycle the cRIO--while understandable because of its enormous cost, it will incapacitate older robots which veteran teams like to maintain for demonstration purposes.

Also, unlike last year's beta test, this year the Java Beta test involves software that is entirely opensource, and can actually be acquired by anyone at this point in time, should you know where to look. Sure they are prerelease, but I can confirm that they work.
At the very least having the documentation available to all teams as it is(once again, loook around carefully--its easier to find than the source), should give everyone interested in using java plenty of opportunity to train on the system.

Re: **FRC EMAIL**/Announcing Beta Test Teams
 

Hey Joe,

Have you correlated which teams are back from last year? Would be interesting to see how many returning decided to do it again ...

- Rick