Bots 'n' Stuff Website

Hey guys!

So a bunch of the forum members got together and built the new Bots ‘n’ Stuff Website!

It’s basically a wiki Vex manual. We tried to organize the information in it to be easily accessible to brand new and old teams alike.

Basically we created the site because we found that there was no good all-in-one source for teams to find information about building robots. We’re trying to consolidate all the useful information from various blogs, forums (mainly this one), and other sources into one website.

At the same time, however, we’re trying to reduce information duplication so while the wiki contains summaries, we’re going to link to tutorials and stuff if they already exist.

I realize Vex already has a wiki, but Bots ‘n’ Stuff wanted to make it clear that this is a community effort. Furthermore, our guide is structured completely differently because we wanted it to be readable from start to finish. The vex wiki is just a list of links which can be cumbersome to navigate. A fresh start was needed.

While this project was started by Bots ‘n’ Stuff, it is definitely a community effort. We’d like everybody with some free time to sign up and contribute your 2 cents to the website (or reduce the size of our To-Do List.) If you need help with the wiki syntax, do not hesitate to contact us. You can also just write content in plaintext (ie without formatting) and someone else will come along and fix it up later.

We hope you enjoy the website!

~Bot ‘n’ Stuff~

Nice security question. Karthik should definitely check it out the account creation (and probably hit refresh a couple of times).

My favorite was the browser question. What browser is 6 letters and isn’t Opera Firefox or Explorer.

Really loving the site so far. Great job Daniel

Thanks dude although it definitely wasn’t all me.

And if anybody has suggestions for some new security questions, I’d like to replace the more bland ones :smiley:

The answer is very true, and that was my favorite one :slight_smile: I refreshed the page a couple of time :slight_smile:

A cool feature for the website might be a videos section. People would embed a YouTube video in the “Videos” section of the website. There could be sub-sections for unofficial robot skills, regional qualification matches, world elimination matches, robot promo videos, and explanation/how to videos.

I have always wanted a single repository for YouTube videos. :smiley:

I like this idea and I’ll set it up.

Robot promo videos and HowTo videos shouldn’t go in the videos section though. Promo videos should be posted along with a robot reveal in the reveal forums. How to videos should go along with a page on the same topic.

Hey guys just wanted to let everybody know that we updated our forums to be more in line with the goals of our website.

We removed all of the Vex Support threads in favor of just one for the rare post that doesn’t belong on Vexforum.

We’ve also added a content suggestion section so people can write up articles or provide links to useful robotics stuff that they think should be shared with the world on the wiki.

This is for people who otherwise wouldn’t edit the wiki. If you want to edit, please do so! We need all the help we can get! But otherwise, we invite you to share any useful information (equations, links, etc) you have for robotics.

Please note that you need to sign up to post in our forums, and I hope to see you there!

Alright so we removed our forums since nobody used them.

If anybody has any suggestions for the site or for content to add, please post in this thread!

If you are looking for a example of match videos… points to bluealliance

Oh wow I like the setup of that site.

It seems like that might be something great for Trevor to integrate into http://www.vexscout.com/ rather than our site. The wiki format doesn’t seem like it would be great for something like that and they already have the ranking scrapers and everything written.

Their project is also open source so some code could be reused if that makes things easier.

If we are interested in doing something like that I would be glad to help out.

rather than our site. The wiki format doesn’t seem like it would be great for something like that and they already have the ranking scrapers and everything written.

Their project is also open source so some code could be reused if that makes things easier.

It could be a joint project between many vexforum members. I would be willing to help out a bit, although website programming is not my forte.

I thought I’d share some interesting website statistics. Sorry about the image size - can’t figure out how to resize them without reuploading lower quality ones.

Most common operating systems:
http://botsnstuff.com/w/images/5/5e/OS.png

Most common locations:
http://botsnstuff.com/w/images/3/30/Location.png

Most common interests:
http://botsnstuff.com/w/images/0/0d/Interests.png

And, predictably, most common genders:
http://botsnstuff.com/w/images/8/8c/Gender.png

Windows Phone has certainly cornered the market :smiley: