FRC Blogged - One Day to Go, FIRST Choice Maintenance and Game Piece Availability, NA

[Hallry]

Taken from the FRC Blog, 1/4/13: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...-one-day-to-go

One Day to Go, FIRST Choice Maintenance and Game Piece Availability, NASA Broadcast, and More!

Blog Date: Friday, January 4, 2013 - 11:43

One Day to Go!

I hope everyone is as excited as we are here at FIRST HQ for Kickoff tomorrow. I actually had a little trouble sleeping last night, and I already know what the game is! (Hey – maybe I had trouble sleeping because the game is so great I can’t wait for us to reveal it!)


FIRST Choice Maintenance and Game Piece Availability

I wanted to make you aware of a planned outage of the FIRST Choice system on Saturday, 1/5/13, from approximately 10am to 4pm Eastern. The outage will accommodate the addition of 100 credits to each Team’s account.

So, as of 4PM ET on Saturday, you will then be able to log in to FIRST Choice. Also at 4PM ET, game pieces will be available for sale from AndyMark. For the first week (until 4PM on 1/12), we’ve asked AndyMark to put a cap on the number of pieces teams can order. More detail will be available after Kickoff.


NASA Broadcast

Great news! NASA will be broadcasting the FRC Kickoff starting at 10:30 ET on both their ‘Public’ and ‘Educational’ channels. This means the broadcast can be viewed both on computer, and, if you have a cable or satellite TV provider who happens to carry the NASA Public Channel (many do) you and your friends and relatives can watch the kickoff right on TV. Ask them to check it out, get them in on the action!

• If you would like to view the kickoff on a computer, go to http://robotics.nasa.gov/ OR http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html, your choice!
• Or, you can just go to the FRC Kickoff page and find the links there.
• If you would like to view the Kickoff on cable or satellite TV, it will be broadcast on NASA's Public & Education channels starting at 10:30AM ET, and other times later in the day. See your local cable or satellite directory to find the NASA Channel.

You will notice that the broadcast is scheduled for an hour. SPOILER ALERT: It ‘might’ be shorter than that.

We’re very grateful to NASA for providing this wonderful service!


Classmate Image Files and Software Updates

Classmate Image files, which allow you to create a USB restoration key for your Classmates, are now available for download. You can find detailed information here, under the ‘Driver Station’ heading: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ical-Resources . Within the instructions, you will find a table showing what is included with the various image options.

Also, all the Software Updates noted as ‘Available January 3’ on this blog http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...-where-and-how were available January 3rd as promised.


Hosting Documents or Files

It’s very important that FIRST, and only FIRST, host FIRST content. That is to say, rather than taking the documents and files you can find through usfirst.org and hosting them on your own sites, we need teams to link to our information instead. There are two main reasons:

1. Version control. Our documents and files may change over time. If a 3rd party host links to the original content instead of the original content, any updates we make will carry through. If the content is hosted instead of linked, the content may become obsolete, but with no notification to the user.
2. Intellectual property. While we’re not particularly possessive of our content, we do have a responsibility to protect FIRST IP. it’s not all created by FIRST, but it’s created for FIRST. So, re-hosting content may or may not infringe on donation agreements, licensing agreements or other matters that may not be public knowledge.

All that being said, we thank you for understanding and respecting this request. If you have questions, please feel free to contact frcteams@usfirst.org or (800) 871-8326, ext. 0.


I’ll blog again soon.

Frank