Today we wanted to remind you about some features and functionality of the FRC Events website and API. At all official events, the Field Management System (FMS) sends data about the event to FIRST’s servers in real-time and we make that data available on both our webpages and our API. Starting with FIRST STEAMWORKS, Teams running off-season events can also apply to have their results available via these resources as well. There’s lots of other great information on these sites, such as full event listings during the competition season, and details about each registered team. You can even access official event data back to the 2006 season now, using the “Switch Seasons” menu on the homepage. If there is a particular team or event you’re interested in, use the bar on the top middle of the homepage to quickly jump around the site. We’ve also improved the awards listings – it’s now possible to see which awards qualify a team for the FIRST Championship, and the team “nickname” alongside their full sponsor list. Starting today, you’ll be able to see event capacities, and soon you’ll be able to watch match videos from FIRST streamed events, and more. FIRST’s continuing partnership with Twitch means that a richer live event viewing experience will also be coming to the FRC Events website for the 2018 season.
From time to time, for improvements to be made, other things must be retired or left by the wayside. In the coming days, a series of pages known as “lasso” will be disappearing (after all, lassos are for Dinosaurs!*). Many in our community may not know these pages exist, but for others they have served as an additional location to gather registration and event data. These pages, many years ago, we’re used by the FMS to communicate with FIRST HQ. Our transition to cloud-based architecture and APIs eliminates the need for these pages, as all the data that was available via “lasso” pages is accessible via our FRC Events website and/or API. We encourage folks who currently utilize lasso pages to use this opportunity to check out our API for all their data needs. You can read through our API documentation and examples here, and join our TeamForge project to receive a key or ask questions.
One of the most popular requests we receive is to view all events, with their capacity information, in one location. We’ve made a page specifically for this purpose- and you’re welcome to reference that page when selecting events to register for this season. The FRC Events website and API will undergo changes to update registration and event data more quickly than last year- up to several times per day. Please note that event information, especially capacity data, is shown for informational purposes only. Lots of factors, including reserve capacity changes and event layout updates can cause this information to change.
All of our pages are cross-browser and mobile-compatible. iPhone and Android users can even use the “Add to Home Screen” options within Safari/Chrome respectively to save the FRC Events webpages to their home screen for quick access- just like “normal” app icons would appear:
There’s also a number of awesome community created applications that available on the App Store or Google Play. Under the hood many of these apps use the FRC Events API, and it can also serve as a great learning opportunity for students and mentors alike. We love to see what the community develops!
As a reminder, with both District Rankings and Event Results, a steady Internet connection from the venue is necessary in order for FMS data to be sent to FIRST servers. The Engineering team understands our community’s desire for the most up to the minute results information and is dedicated to ensuring this is available with all events. In cases where Internet is not available, or experiences outages, the missing data will be uploaded as soon as possible, either during or after the event.
We invite you to share the links for the FRC Events website (https://frc-events.firstinspires.org) with your friends and family, so they can track your team’s progress through the season. Additionally, we’re always looking for ways to improve your experience with our products, and we welcome feedback at [email protected] for our future planning!
Best of luck this season- we’ll see you at the events!
- As we learned in Valley of Gwangi, of course:
Oh god… goes off to check various scripts
The Events API is pretty nice. For several years now it’s powered the MN State Championship rankings calculation, which helped to eliminate the manual entry errors that plagued us the first couple of years before the API came out!
I like Ray Harryhausen. I like Willis O’Brien too.
Also, I read “Di…” and thought “I hope it’s Diplodocus” and then it was “Dinosaur” so I wasn’t as disappointed as I could have been.
Is Valley of Gwangi worse than The Beast of Hollow Mountain?
So…they basically recreated TBA? In their own version?
In the coming days, a series of pages known as “lasso” will be disappearing
Will this kill FRClinks?
Videos are cool and all, but I got really excited for a second thinking that FIRST might be exposing even more match data with their API. Somewhere down the road it would be amazing if the API exposed the match breakdown data for every second in each match, there would be so many crazy fun statistics we could make with that info.
Then again, I have been publishing results of statistics projects about once a month for the past year and I still have a backlog of at least 4 other projects I want to work on, so its probably good for me personally that they haven’t done this yet.
Well, though it isn’t from FIRST, it might help you out if you have match videos readily available. You could split videos into frames, look at the time, and see what changed since the last frame and based on the scoring elements for a year, interpolate alliance scoring rates for different objectives.
psssssst @first … guess what people are still going to be using… i’ll give you a hint, it rhymes with “the glue alliance”.
You can’t fault FIRST for trying to improve their own tools. They can’t promote TBA, just as they can’t promote CD. There are lots of teams that don’t use either of those tools, so shutting down the FIRST forums or letting frc-events stagnate is not a viable option. Plus, what if the TBA devs decide that they can’t maintain it any more and it goes dead? You’ll be happy that frc-events shows this information.
But they can promote it. They already showed that they are able to promote something like TBA by promoting “the orange alliance” for FTC. CENTERSTAGE presented by RTX Game & Season Materials | FIRST Scroll down to where it says “season results” and the orange alliance is clearly listed.
FRClinks hasn’t been working for 2018, yet.
Aye, because nobody is registered for 2018 events yet.
That looks super interesting! I’ll increase my backlog by 1.
Please just show the event capacity.
Yes, we know it can change based on many factors, but please just include the “expected” reserves in a number somewhere.
What if, yes what if, we want to know about how many teams will actually be attending and that could affect decisions being made?
That’s not what I was getting at.
I literally cannot see any regional events listed via FRC Event Web : 2024 Season Event List. The message comes up that the page does not exist.
Therefore, it’s already broken at least part of frclinks.
I don’t control the regional list page at http://173.255.246.196 (where FRC Event Web : 2024 Season Event List redirects to) and I don’t know who does. Hoping that it’ll either start working before registration starts, or that there will be an equivalent frc-events page I can link to.
If someone knows of an alternate page I’d be happy to hear about it.
FIRST also gave TOA all the data it had (which wasnt too much. last couple years iirc)
I’d say this is a fair equivalent.