Brainstorm - The Blue Alliance v4

[Greg Marra]

Hi all,

The Blue Alliance team is working over the summer on the next version of The Blue Alliance site, which will be the forth major revision to the codebase. This update, if things go as planned, will be a near complete rewrite of the site, incorporating what we've learned about providing high quality up to the minute data and scaling to tens of thousands of videos of FIRST Robotics Competition matches.

We would like to know what features you think it is important for The Blue Alliance to offer. We are going to continue to provide the great match results and video archives we have always offered, but we think there are other exciting possibilities for The Blue Alliance to best serve teams. We want to help you relieve your greatest matches and show parents and sponsors what FIRST is really enabling.

As a quick aside, this redesign is going to be completely open sourced from the ground floor. As soon as we've got the basic functionality together, we are going to publish the code to a Github repository so you can yell at us for sloppy code style, publish back bug fixes, and contribute new features to the site. We think there are a lot of great software initiatives going on in the FIRST community, and we want to make sure what we have made is open for others to learn from and contribute back to.

Please use this thread to tell us about what your personal perfect The Blue Alliance would look like, and we will take this feedback into account during our redesign.

Thanks,
-Greg Marra and The Blue Alliance team

[EricH]

Personally, I'd like to see TBA list awards for teams, in addition to match results.

A match rating system would be great, too: 1-5 stars, 5 means a really exciting, really close match; 1 means that it's a not-really-one-you-want-to-show-someone.

Would there be a way to get the pre-penalty scores, in addition to the final ones?

[Stephen Kowski]

Originally Posted by EricH

A match rating system would be great, too: 1-5 stars, 5 means a really exciting, really close match; 1 means that it's a not-really-one-you-want-to-show-someone.

I like this concept, but even something simple as a 'digg' or 'bury' type option would be incredibly useful. Organized by year and week, then maybe overall regardless of year.

Teams 1114/842/etc all have various data. Interfaces and presentation vary heavily, but generally they all collect some basic data. Allowing teams to combine all this data via TBA is a challenge, but could be an opportunity.

TBA is in a unique position to help organize a minimum data standard. This data standard can be developed once the game has been revealed so people designing collection systems have input. Teams can collect whatever else they think is useful, but once the standard is set that's all that will be added to TBA.

Now, even though I am not at an event I can get a pretty good idea of how the team acts on the field if the data is available regardless of who collected it.

For example, Team X in 2010 had a shot accuracy of 25% in their first event, 62% in their second but they took half as many shots so maybe they changed how they played the game.

[electron]

I think it would be nice to have the ability to comment on the videos posted. just an idea

[Phoenix Spud]

I would like to see it be a combo of the current site and the ideas from TheRedAlliance.net .

[rulesall2]

Originally Posted by Phoenix Spud

I would like to see it be a combo of the current site and the ideas from TheRedAlliance.net .

The only problem I can see here is teams inflating their abilities, which is mainly what happens in pit scouting anyways.

Originally Posted by M.Wong

Integration with the First Wiki?

I like this suggestion a bit more, and coupled with an option for teams to upload their own competition photos separate from their official robot photo would be cool too. Teams could post cool robot action shots and really show off their spirit to other teams and potential FIRSTers/sponsors. I think there is a lack of photos that exemplify the excitement of FIRST competitions readily available other than what you can scrounge up off of team's websites and Facebook pages. For organization of the photos, you could integrate almost like a Facebook type tagging system that would make it easy to find photos of your team posted by others.

Any other suggestions? I really like where some of these suggestions are headed, and I would once again like to thank all of the hard working people at TBA.


-Jack

[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

[Tom Bottiglieri]

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.

How about a one-to-many relationship between matches and videos, where each match could have a variety of admin or user added videos. These could be housed on TBA's servers (the situation today) or linked to from an external source like YouTube or Vimeo. The user experience should be seamless no matter the source.

[BrendanB]

One thing that I miss from the older site is that when I search for a team number I get a list of team pages not a direct search to a team number like an older version. In some ways it is nice as a regional or alliance partner comes up, but if you search for my team 1519 the number 1 result is team 1058 and alliance partners from this year and I have to go through another teams page to get to ours. I have searched other team numbers and have found the same problem but for most searches the team you want is the first on the list. Additionally a few months ago searching for 1519 showed our 2009 year and not our 2010 year.

I like the idea of having search results, but when it doesn't bring up the team number or current year it kinda annoys me.

But thank you so much for all your hard work put into the site! I have enjoyed watching matches all year round and learning past histories of a team. I don't think you guys get enough credit!

Thank you thebluealliance.net!

[NickE]

I think it'd be nice to have higher quality streaming video. I think the easiest solution is to host videos on an external site such as Youtube or Vimeo and embed them (both have support for HD streaming). This could eliminate the issues TBA has been having with lack of server space and make the match watching experience more enjoyable.

[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!