Brainstorm - The Blue Alliance v4

[kstl99]

Originally Posted by Radical Pi

I would like to see the posibility of having 2 videos per match. One would be the "official" video that's taken from the field feed, and another "stands" video, uploaded by teams that recorded every single match with a full view of the field, without the scores feed.

I'd also like to see, if possible, information about what penalties were assessed in the match and possibly to which teams (if applicable). It could be tough, but perhaps FIRST could be lobbied to make that information available

Pretty much took my thoughts but I will restate them slihtly differently.

I would really like to see what penalties were assessed to who and why. Is it possible to edit out the waiting period between the end of a match and the announcement of the final score and penalties?

I also love the idea of multiple videos of a single match.

And I would like to see more matches captured on video. Hopefully enough people want this and can help provide you the recordings.

[SteveGPage]

Here is my wishlist!

1. Support for mobile devices - a "m.thebluealliance.net" or ".mobi" site optimized for smartphones, iPhones, etc...

2. An advanced query function

3. Export data from queries to csv/xls/pdf format

Thanks for all you do!

Steve

[Jonathan Norris]

I think one of the main things that should be in v4 is killing flash alltogether and going with h.264 and try HTLM5 for the video playback. This will give us better quality output and across the board mobile device compatability. I'm not sure what your server situation is like but we should really build a script that will take the uploaded video files and encode it to a standard, without having to take download it, rename it, encode it, create a jpeg, then reupload it all. That got pretty time consuming...

It could be done using a shell script (maybe some php... not too sure) and Handbrake CLI (or just x264) and ffmpeg to create the screen shot (if still needed). I'd be interested in helping out with this if you have the server side capabilities to do this.

[Katie_UPS]

Maybe a banner that says "This team is no longer active" when it applies. Its nice to know at a first glance.

[Greg Marra]

I am loving these suggestions. These are really helpful for us to figure out how to architect the new system to provide the features that will help teams most.

Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!

[jblay]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

I am loving these suggestions. These are really helpful for us to figure out how to architect the new system to provide the features that will help teams most.

Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!

One thing I do is send out an email to the team targeted at the new members telling them which teams to watch videos of on thebluealliance.net from past years to learn from their robots and strategies.

I also once to improve my strategy watched a whole regional one match at a time never rewinding and took notes on every team. I put together an alliance selection list and a strategy for the top teams.

In addition I do the traditional watch teams attending our events and the best teams in the nation.

[BradMello]

1. Have www.thebluealliance.net/*insertteamnumberhere* link directly to a teams profile
2. I noticed this year that there was quite a lack of videos; provide somewhere examples of how to record footage, whether it be from the streaming broadcast or directly at the event.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!

I'd pull up matches from Newton for 1714's demos sometimes. Video quality wasn't very good since that year's video was ripped from the webcast but it got the job done.

I would have used TBA for scouting but there was very little video this year, so I can't really comment on that.

[J93Wagner]

I've noticed that while typically the content of the match is good, at least for what i've been looking at, the low quality rivals that of Youtube at times, making what was an awesome match look a lot less awesome...

[Alex Cormier]

1. Quality of videos...
2. Have a year by year section of just robot photos in numerical order.
3. Bring back the quick search for teams on the right, it was replaced? with a google search.

[XaulZan11]

One thing that I would like to have is a team's history on all one page. Sometimes I want to see if a team is historically good or not. You could basically have each years events, record and result (not selected, quarterfinalist...). Of course, you can then click on each of these events or years for those videos.

I don't think this has been mentioned but maybe have the final seedings/rankings for each event.

I'm not sure I like having a lot of 'user generated' stuff (robot specifics/pit scouting, user posted videos of pre-ship, scouting data). Unless we can get atleast 80% of the data, I think everything will be so sparse that it would become meaningless and never looked at. In regards to the scouting data, unless I know whose data it is, I would never take any of it seriously.

Thanks again for all the work put into TBA. It has really made scouting super easy the past few years.

[Jamie Kalb]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

Can anyone tell stories about how they have used The Blue Alliance to introduce other people to FIRST, show sponsors, or scout for events? We don't have a huge amount of insight into how these scenarios play out and would love to hear your stories!

I've used TBA to explain the game challenge (post-season). Often I'll try to explain it with the game animation, but the people I'm explaining to can't visualize actual robots playing it. Then I'll show them a really well-played match from TBA , and they go, "Ohhhhh, that's what it looks like!" Post-season 2009, I showed a lot of people this match. It helped a lot in recruiting for my team.

I've also used TBA during the season to scout teams going into their second regional. It helps a lot to know not just that someone dominated a regional, but how they dominated it.

I <3 TBA! Thanks so much Greg and company!