The Blue Alliance

At the end of the first week of competition, the combined efforts of the community have resulted in 294 videos of matches on The Blue Alliance, including the entirety of the Midwest Regional, the New Jersey Regional, and the St. Louis Regional. Special thanks to those who recorded and helped cut up these events, including Kyle Fenton, DeAnnaC, Jonathon Norris, SOAP 108, and more! Your efforts have been invaluable and we wouldn’t have this great scouting resource without you!

Next week there are another 5 regionals: Arizona, Finger Lakes, Kansas City, NASA / VCU, and San Diego. We have people who have said they will be recording four of these five events. Hopefully we’ll be able to recruit the help of the community in parsing any video that needs parsing like we did this week, and get as many of these videos online as soon as possible!

Also, check out Week 1’s highest scoring match - 146 points by 2041, 1114, and 1024

We can’t wait to see what happens in Week Two!

With the exception of Q39, the entire Midwest Regional is online!

Enjoy!

The Blue Alliance will be webcasting the 2008 Boston Regional Live! Here is a little promotional widget I threw together. You can click the links at the bottom and embed it in your own Facebook profile or blog to spread the word and have your friends watch you live in the Boston Regional!

The Blue Alliance has set up an e-mail address for teams to submit photos of their 2008 robots. By building a complete set of robot photos, The Blue Alliance hopes to make pre-scouting for regionals much easier and more efficient for teams. This feature debuted for the Indiana Robotics Invitational last year, and you can see how easy it is to scout teams by viewing the 2007 IRI page on The Blue Alliance.

To submit a photo of your team or another team’s 2008 robot, send an email to photos+2008@thebluealliance.net. Attach a horizontally oriented photo of your robot named ###.jpg where ### is your team’s number. For instance, if you are team 5462, attach “5462.jpg”, and if you are team 1, attached “1.jpg”. Automated scripts handle downloading and processing the attachmenets, so it is important you stick to this convention!

Don’t forget to take a photo of your robot in the big rush to ship! Send it to photos+2008@thebluealliance.net and help scouts see just how great of a machine you’ve built!

In preparation for the 2008 Competition Season, The Blue Alliance is releasing The Blue Alliance API. The Blue Alliance API allows developers to integrate data from The Blue Alliance pertinent to teams, events, matches, and team attendance within their own applications. This presents the developer with an exciting opportunity to build systems that respond dynamically to team and event statistics, and more.

We hope that people are able to use this interface to display team statistics on their team websites, match information on regional websites, and maybe even roll this into some sort of scouting application! Read the documentation online. To apply for an API key, send a message to contact+apikey@thebluealliance.net.

So once you’re sick of writing C to do twelve laps in hybrid mode, consider breaking out some web development languages and have fun with our new API!