This Week in FRC Aug 25th – 31st

With two off-season events this was one of the busiest weeks of the fall for FRC.

Chezy Champs

The inaugural Chezy Champs was an unbelievable success. We spent Sunday watching the live stream and enjoyed one of the best FRC viewing experiences ever. Chezy Champs was prodiemetly California teams with a few from the pacific northwest and our friends FRC#148, The Robowranglers, made the journey to Bellarmine College Prep as well.

The GameSense crew was doing pre and post match commentary along with Karthik as the MC, and Paul Copioli as the announcer this event had one of the largest and best commentary crews of any FRC event.

Congratulations to the champions of Chezy Champs 2014, FRC#1678, FRC#254, & FRC#973. That was most likely the most dominant alliance we have seen all season. The biggest surprise was just how well the #2 alliance played them in the finals. FRC#846, FRC#971, & FRC#2135 went cycle for cycle with them in Finals 1. If you only watch one match, watch this match.

All the elimination matches can be seen on The Blue Alliance.

Chezy Arena is the system that was used to run all the matches, provide video overlays, and more. This is a wonderful system and the developers will be releasing the source code soon.

Red Stick Rumble

Spectrum was out in Baton Rouge this weekend for the 2nd annual Red Stick Rumble. Daniel Eiland and the rest of FRC#3337, Panthrobotics, do a great job of hosting a fantastic event. It’s the only off-season event for teams in the Bayou region.

We ran the webstream for this event and have all the matches archived on Youtube and The Blue Alliance.

Congratulations to the Champions FRC#2587, FRC#4587, & FRC#1818 and also the finalists FRC#364, FRC#1421, FRC#4978. These two alliances took the finals to 3 matches and the third match was decided by the tie breaker rules. Again, if you only watch one match Red Stick Rumble make it this one.

FRC Blog

The FRC Blog had a pretty busy week as well. They announced an FRC Tools Developers Conference which will lead into a new API for the Field Management System so tools such as TheBlueAlliance, FRC Megaphone, FRC spyder, scouting apps and more will be able to get better data for all of us to use. This is a very good thing and we are very happy that headquarters is taking action to improve this.

There was also a dual Frank Answers Friday. He talks about the open and reserve capacity at regional events. To summarize, Regionals are now holding 15 spots instead of 10 for local and rookie teams. He also discusses the quality of video coverage at events. This was before the beauty that was the Chezy Champs coverage. We all have a lot of work to do to get to their level.

CD Threads of the Week

Penalizing Mecanum Wheels during Alliance Selection

Team 254 Presents: Chezy Champs

Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android