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.

[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.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=75368

[MarkoRamius1086]

When will the off season matches (such as IRI and BOB...) be posted on TheBlueAlliance?

[Nevets Amstier]

Greg-

As to how TBA is used to introduce people to first:

At the start of each new fall semester, Clarkson tries to recruit new college students via the activities fair, followed by a more formal introductory meeting. At this meeting we always start with a more in-depth explanation which is best done by showing match videos from various years, pictures of truly excellent robots, and the game introduction videos.


Suggestions:

1) I think it'd be useful to have a simple page associated with each year that archives the game intro video, with a simple description of the game (scoring methods, penalties, etc..) as well as the teams/people who won NATIONAL recognition (nat'l chairmans, nat'l woodie flowers, Overall Winners, Overall Runner-ups, nat'l autodesk, nat'l safety vid, etc...)

2) I know that this suggestion is way out there seeing as all of you have your own careers/schooling to think about. But I would LOVE to see the return of TBA to the kickoff event. For alot of teams, the way TBA members demonstrated how the game elements behaved, how big they were, descriptions of texture, etc... were unbelievabley helpful.

Thanks!

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by 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.

Greg, I think you guys need a ticker up at the top. Hours of video served (maybe displayed in days). Hours of video hosted. Calls made to FIRST website. And most importantly, hours of development (Maybe include a rough estimate of the cost if you were to charge for your services. I guess I would call that "useful" information.

Sorry for derailing the thread...

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Greg, I think you guys need a ticker up at the top. Hours of video served (maybe displayed in days). Hours of video hosted. Calls made to FIRST website. And most importantly, hours of development (Maybe include a rough estimate of the cost if you were to charge for your services. I guess I would call that "useful" information.

I think this is valuable feedback. We don't do a good job logging right now in a way that gives us deep insight to people's interaction patterns. We should do a better job and make a public dashboard.

Originally Posted by Nevets Amstier

1) I think it'd be useful to have a simple page associated with each year that archives the game intro video, with a simple description of the game (scoring methods, penalties, etc..) as well as the teams/people who won NATIONAL recognition (nat'l chairmans, nat'l woodie flowers, Overall Winners, Overall Runner-ups, nat'l autodesk, nat'l safety vid, etc...)

I like this idea for each year's page. I think a "Welcome to Breakaway" page would be valuable throughout the whole season. Want to know about the 2011 FIRST game? Go to The Blue Alliance.

Originally Posted by GGCO

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.

You are right that the right hand sidebar isn't very useful. It does link to the Developer API.

Originally Posted by Tom Line

Since you automatically get the information up on the page anyway, it would be neat if you could implement OPR for each year. That OPR could update as the new scores came in.

Likewise, it would be cool if people were able to post webcast links on TBA for given events.

If someone can write a Python library to calculate OPR scores, it would be much easier for us to implement. How long does running OPR math take? If it's very long, we'll have to think about it harder, but if we can get it to run in under 30 seconds, we can drop it straight in.

Webcast links is an awesome idea that we'll be sure to do.

Originally Posted by ProgramLuke

Any idea when this new TBA will be operational?

I think we'll have something people can play with by the end of October. In an ideal world, we'd have the basic site good to go by 2011 and mobile apps good to go by ship day. Unfortunately, we're dramatically understaffed.

Thanks for all your thoughts and ideas!
-Greg

[NickE]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

...mobile apps good to go by ship day.

You might already know about this, but PhoneGap provides a nice way to write the code for mobile apps once and have it work on Android/iPhone/Blackberry/webOs/etc rather than re-writing code for each platform (That and you write the code in HTML/CSS/JS).

[OverdriveAdge]

Would it be possible to add FTC and maybe even FLL teams to the database?