Bill's Blog -- Announcing the Beta Test Teams

[Michael Blake]

We're honored as a 2011 Rookie team to be chosen to help with C/C++ for 2012!!


http://frcdirector.blogspot.com/2011...est-teams.html


Good Afternoon Teams,

We’ve chosen the 2012 Beta Test teams. Everyone who applied has been contacted, so I’m happy to announce the following teams will be helping us review the software libraries and build new code to share with all teams. My thanks to everyone who offered to help with this project. All FRC teams will be able to communicate with the Beta Test teams on the forums.

Testing C/C++:
108 SIGMAC@T
166 Chop Shop
234 Cyber Blue
294 Beach Cities Robotics
303 Panther Robotics
537 Charger Robotics
604 Quixilver
772 Sabre Bytes
781 Kinetic Knights
973 GRR
987 The High Rollers
1334 Red Devils
1511 Rolling Thunder
1519 Mechanical Mayhem
1671 Buchanan Bird Brains
1714 More Robotics
1758 Technomancers
1816 The Green Machine
2358 Bearbotics
2809 Kbotics
2903 NeoBots
3457 MacBotics
3481 Bronc Botz
3771 Da Yooper Troopers
3824 RoHawktics

Testing Java:
11 MORT
20 The Rocketeers
125 NUTRONS
175 Buzz Robotics
178 2nd Law Enforcers
228 Gus Robotics
341 Miss Daisy
610 The Coyotes
694 Stuypulse
1002 CircuitRunners
1014 Dublin Robotics
1160 Firebird Robotics
1279 ColdFusion
2177 The Robettes
2477 Rascal Robotics
2648 Infinite Loop
2846 FireBears
2967 Iron Devils
2977 Sir Lancer Bots
3309 Friarbots
3341 The Manhattan Project
3630 Stampede
3660 The Lightsabers
3780 Robot Unicorn Attack
3807 Blazerbots

Testing LabVIEW:
33 Killer Bees
45 TechnoKats
53 Area 53
75 RoboRaiders
357 Royal Assault
624 CRyptonite
836 RoboBees
1023 Bedford Express
1208 The MeTool Brigade
1718 The Fighting Pi
1764 Liberty Robotics
1847 Wyandotte H.S. Robodogs
1912 Team Combustion
2168 Aluminu Falcons
2169 KING TeC
2403 Team Plasma
2435 Soldiers of Technology
2530 Inconcievable
2579 The Robodogs
3158 TECBOT
3242 WILDCATS
3339 BumbleB
3558 FBR'botz
3572 Wavelength
3619 Blackhawks

113 days until Kickoff
See you then!

[Racer26]

Interesting, a total lack of Team IFI teams. Also, the distribution of Canadian teams seems abnormally heavy on the C/C++ side.

[Joe Ross]

I'm glad to see so many young teams. Hopefully their fresh perspective will improve everything.

[Akash Rastogi]

Woot! Congrats teams, and congrats 11 and 341. Hopefully teams will provide published results for the public of the JAVA testing.

[rachelholladay]

Woohoo! Really excited to be doing LabVIEW down south!

[Mark McLeod]

See if this plot of all the Beta teams worked.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by 1075guy

Interesting, a total lack of Team IFI teams. Also, the distribution of Canadian teams seems abnormally heavy on the C/C++ side.

1. Teams get to request what language they are beta testing. If more Canadian teams have C/C++, perhaps more of them requested it.

2. What Team IFI teams applied for beta testing?

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

1. Teams get to request what language they are beta testing. If more Canadian teams have C/C++, perhaps more of them requested it.

2. What Team IFI teams applied for beta testing?

Not this one. We had our fun with Beta testing in the fall of 2008, and have passed on the opportunity ever since. I'm quite confident that Teams 610, 1334 and 2809 will do a great job testing and sharing their knowledge with the rest of the Canadian FIRST community.

[Michael Blake]

Originally Posted by Karthik

Not this one. We had our fun with Beta testing in the fall of 2008, and have passed on the opportunity ever since.

COULD you define/explain "fun"?

As a 2011 Rookie team selected for C/C++ testing, I have to ask is it more "Yikes!" than "Cool!" ?

THANKS for your input...

[Brandon Holley]

125 is excited to be a beta team for java!

-Brando

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Michael Blake

COULD you define/explain "fun"?

As a 2011 Rookie team selected for C/C++ testing, I have to ask is it more "Yikes!" than "Cool!" ?

THANKS for your input...

Definitely more "Cool" than "Yikes!". You have the opportunity to test new technologies on behalf of the teams in your local community, as well as teams across FIRST. If you go "all in" there's a great deal of work required, we felt that to a certain degree it was like a second build season. Now that being said, many teams have had less intensive experiences. I'm quite certain your team is going enjoy yourselves.

Overall, we'd sign up again, but our fall schedule is just too busy nowadays. I made the comment the other day that FIRST is now a 60 week per year commitment, unfortunately our calendar only has 52 weeks. (Until they add the month of "Smarch")

[DonRotolo]

Hard work, but definitely worth it. Plus, you get to teach other teams all about it at Kickoff! Warm up your PowerPoint slides!

[MagiChau]

Now we have an official list of teams we can blame if some code in the library doesn't work when we get it on kickoff day! Joke aside, I thank the teams putting in the effort for this.