Brainstorm - The Blue Alliance v4

[Andrew Schreiber]

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]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

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.

[M.Wong]

Integration with the First Wiki?

[keehun]

Maybe hop on the HTML5 bandwagon... :-)

[Chris is me]

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.

[Dale]

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.

[artdutra04]

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]

Perhaps an "official" TBA iPhone/Android/other smartphone app could be made to make everything very mobile-friendly

[Dale]

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]

Originally Posted by Dale

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.

[StevenB]

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]

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]

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.

[GGCO]

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]

Originally Posted by GGCO

I'd also LOVE to see a public api so I could write my own scripts to automate some of my team's scouting.

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