FRC Blogged - One Day to Go, FIRST Choice Maintenance and Game Piece Availability, NA

FIRST General Forum
1

Taken from the FRC Blog, 1/4/13: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/blog-one-day-to-go

One Day to Go, FIRST Choice Maintenance and Game Piece Availability, NASA Broadcast, and More!

**Blog Date: **Friday, January 4, 2013 - 11:43

One Day to Go!

I hope everyone is as excited as we are here at FIRST HQ for Kickoff tomorrow. I actually had a little trouble sleeping last night, and I already know what the game is! (Hey – maybe I had trouble sleeping because the game is so great I can’t wait for us to reveal it!)

FIRST Choice Maintenance and Game Piece Availability

I wanted to make you aware of a planned outage of the FIRST Choice system on Saturday, 1/5/13, from approximately 10am to 4pm Eastern. The outage will accommodate the addition of 100 credits to each Team’s account.

So, as of 4PM ET on Saturday, you will then be able to log in to FIRST Choice. Also at 4PM ET, game pieces will be available for sale from AndyMark. For the first week (until 4PM on 1/12), we’ve asked AndyMark to put a cap on the number of pieces teams can order. More detail will be available after Kickoff.

NASA Broadcast

Great news! NASA will be broadcasting the FRC Kickoff starting at 10:30 ET on both their ‘Public’ and ‘Educational’ channels. This means the broadcast can be viewed both on computer, and, if you have a cable or satellite TV provider who happens to carry the NASA Public Channel (many do) you and your friends and relatives can watch the kickoff right on TV. Ask them to check it out, get them in on the action!

You will notice that the broadcast is scheduled for an hour. SPOILER ALERT: It ‘might’ be shorter than that.

We’re very grateful to NASA for providing this wonderful service!

**Classmate Image Files and Software Updates
**
Classmate Image files, which allow you to create a USB restoration key for your Classmates, are now available for download. You can find detailed information here, under the ‘Driver Station’ heading: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/2013-Technical-Resources . Within the instructions, you will find a table showing what is included with the various image options.

Also, all the Software Updates noted as ‘Available January 3’ on this blog http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/blog-information-for-2013-the-what-when-where-and-how were available January 3rd as promised.

Hosting Documents or Files

It’s very important that FIRST, and only FIRST, host FIRST content. That is to say, rather than taking the documents and files you can find through usfirst.org and hosting them on your own sites, we need teams to link to our information instead. There are two main reasons:

  1. Version control. Our documents and files may change over time. If a 3rd party host links to the original content instead of the original content, any updates we make will carry through. If the content is hosted instead of linked, the content may become obsolete, but with no notification to the user.
  2. Intellectual property. While we’re not particularly possessive of our content, we do have a responsibility to protect FIRST IP. it’s not all created by FIRST, but it’s created for FIRST. So, re-hosting content may or may not infringe on donation agreements, licensing agreements or other matters that may not be public knowledge.

All that being said, we thank you for understanding and respecting this request. If you have questions, please feel free to contact [email protected] or (800) 871-8326, ext. 0.

I’ll blog again soon.

Frank

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Why the short Kickoff I wonder…

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If the kickoff is really less than an hour long, that might indicate a new golden era of making the speeches shorter and sweeter and thus more effective.

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I wonder how long Dean is going to talk for? Usually that takes up at least 30 minutes of Kickoff. Not complaining, I actually prefer when Dean talks, its inspirational. Just not sure how he will fit into an under 1 hour kickoff.

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As a software engineer I am very much for old versions of the manual not floating around, I just wish FIRST would get one of their partners like Google to help host the initial documents on kickoff day :slight_smile:

As a software engineer I am also lazy and hate typing in the encryption password until the FIRST site comes back :rolleyes:

6

I applaud them limiting the number of game pieces you can purchase from AM in FIRST Choice. It looks like they have already learned from the first FIRST Choice opening.

I hope that doesn’t mean we have another ‘limited quantity’ game piece that is not feasible to make or buy outside FIRST channels shudder.

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That sounds like a done-deal.

The question is, does “limited” mean 1 or 111? I guess it depends on the game!

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It also might mean you can’t get the game pieces anywhere else.

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Personally, I LIKE the game pieces that MUST be obtained through FIRST channels (such as 2012’s balls, 2011’s tubes, 2008’s trackballs (kind of), 2007’s tubes, 2004’s balls) because FIRST is pretty good about getting an appropriate number for the season, including build.

When they use some obscure manufacturer who sells through big chains, who isn’t prepared for the volume, the game pieces immediately become unobtainium. (See: 2009’s Orbit Balls, 2010’s official soccer balls, 2003’s Sterilite Bins, 2006’s Poof balls)

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55 minute speech and 5 minute game animation?

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I understand and will respect FIRST’s decision to protect their IP, but I wonder why Frank didn’t speak to the concerns that led to people hosting the documents. On Kickoff Day last year, it was near impossible to get the manual from the FIRST site (at least until later in the afternoon). Does FIRST think it won’t be a problem this year or do they simply consider the IP concerns more important than utility for teams?

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I think it is more likely that they assume that the encrypted documents which they have reminded teams about repeatedly over the last 3 days provide enough utility for the few hours that the site gets wrecked.

I’m guessing that controlling released versions of the rules is the real sticking point on this issue.

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FIRST’s reply regarding a comment about their website crashing and being unreliable on kickoff day:

2013
Submitted by rkue on Fri, 01/04/2013 - 14:54.
Sunny, you’re absolutely right that there has been website congestion in the past, which is why we released encrypted versions ahead of time. Our awesome IT team also added additional capacity to the website, which should make web traffic less of a concern. That being said, content should not be re-hosted elsewhere, even if with the best intentions. Please watch this blog for updates and have a blast tomorrow!

We’ll see. We’ll see.

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Could you just download the encrypted version, stick it on a pendrive or something and then just type in the password when it comes up? Makes the whole website crashing thing kinda moot.

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You can, and you should. That’s what FIRST wants yuo to do with the encrypted manual, and the reason they publish it ahead of Kickoff.

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I believe that is the intent. Download it now, so you’re not clogging the servers on Saturday. The problem is with HOSTING the files where others can download it in an uncontrolled copy well into the future.

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Well, I know our school has a “Hand Out” folder that teachers use to hand out to kids. Our sponsor (a tech ed teacher) just downloads it and sticks it in there, ensuring any computer connected to the school network is able to reach the document.
Or a team could use the Google drive, Dropbox, Box.com, there’s a lot of file sharing options.

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Yes.

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That’s encouraging. I used the excrypted manual last year and am doing so again this year, but I’m not sure how wide usage is. I do know I had to pass around copies after Kickoff last year because many people didn’t download it beforehand.

I do want to commend FIRST for their quick replying. It seems like ever since Frank took over we’ve seen prompt responses to comments on the blog.

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FIRST doesn’t care how your team distributes the manual internally. They just care if you put it in a place that the general public can get at it. (A few solutions may overlap between internal distribution and public access, so be careful.)