Hey CDziens, your friendly Blue Alliance contributor Tim here with some updates for y’all that might be useful for first time FRC event-goers and veterans alike.
Cache Updates
First things first, we’ve been having issues with caching due to Cloudflare, and as such, we disabled Cloudflare caching for Week 1 to observe the performance impact. This ensured that even with their service degradation as referenced in @Eugene_Fang’s post, you still can see robot photos, event results, and more in a timely manner. We re-renabled caching via Cloudflare for the time being, please let us know of any stale data you might come across while using TBA!
myTBA
myTBA is a feature of The Blue Alliance on Web, Android, and iOS to keep track of your favorite teams on the go, with push notifications on mobile for iOS and Android when signed in. Super handy feature to know when your team has an upcoming match (though please use the official schedule more), your friend’s team got an award, and more. Thanks again to @Zach_O for his work on the iOS app and making it a reality!
I personally use myTBA to keep track of a half dozen or so teams and it’s been indispensable to keeping on top of things.
Robot Photos / TBA Media
If you’ve visited a team page or event page on TBA, you might notice that there are blank boxes or “Add Robot Image” text boxes on web. This media is entirely user contributed, and as such, we rely on you to post your robot photos and to brag about the awesome robots you’ve made this season.
That said, we realized our media guidelines as published and the guidelines we informally use to moderate those submitted images aren’t 1:1, so here’s my notes on how to “grade” a robot photo for The Blue Alliance:
- 10 - White or transparent background, no students + well framed, 1080p or above, minimal “obvious” editing. (Example: 111 2020)
- 7-9 - Relatively uniform background (on field photos usually meet these criteria), high resolution, no editing, no students in frame, not blurry. (Example: 118 2019)
- 5-6 - Noisy background, high resolution, some blurring. Difficult to identify robot features. Sometimes “artsy” (Example: 484 2020)
- 3-5 - Noisy background, low resolution, some students may be in frame, no bumpers.
- 1-2- Team photo with robot, difficult to see features, photo in bag (!), etc.
- 0 - No robot.
For your “preferred” robot photos, as in the ones seen at the top of your team page for the season and on their events page when competing, you’ll want to submit a few photos at 7 or above rating, but any number of high resolution photos of your robot are a good idea to submit. You can see our current robot media guidelines on the submission page here, for example and can even submit robot photos directly from Android while at event!
Webcast Videos!
While FIRST has rolled out the webcast units to make watching events that much easier, many districts still aren’t on the official webcast unit, and their post-event video edits have to manually approved by our moderators (hi!) Since there are hundreds of videos we have to verify or reject per day, it can quickly balloon to difficult size. If you’d like to get keys to get your match video auto-approved, please reach out to us at [email protected]
In short:
Keep track of teams at events in near-real time with myTBA on Mobile and Web!
Please submit high resolution robot photos for future reference and to make the event quality of your peers that much better!
District coordinators, please reach out to skip our moderation queue for match video submissions.
Hope you all had a happy week 1, we’ll see you in Week 2!