Creating a form dropdown from db

[eluser]Bionicjoe[/eluser]
I've went through several articles on creating forms and dropdowns, but I'm not getting anywhere. I just want to get a list from my database and use the data for the select items.

Here's what I've got.

Controller

Code:

function sitedropdown()
    {
        $this->load->model('outage_model');
        $this->outage_model->sitedropdown();
    }
}

Model

Code:

function sitedropdown()
    {
        $q = $this->db->get('location.sitename');
            return $q->result_array();
    }

View

Code:

<?php
            //Call Submit function from controller.
            echo form_open('outage/submit_addticket');
?>
                <table>
                    <tr><td>Number</td><td>&lt;input type="text" name="ticketnumber"&gt;&lt;/td><tr>
                    <tr><td>Summary</td><td>&lt;input type="text" name="summary"&gt;&lt;/td><tr>
                    <tr><td>Location</td><td>&lt;?php echo form_dropdown('sitedropdown', [b]$somedata[/b]); ?&gt;</td><tr>
                    <tr><td>Start</td><td>&lt;input type="text" name="starttime"&gt;&lt;/td><tr>
                    <tr><td>End</td><td>&lt;input type="text" name="endtime"&gt;&lt;/td><tr>
                    <tr><td></td><td>&lt;input type="submit" value="Submit"&gt;&lt;/td><tr>
                </table>
            &lt;/form&gt;

The $somedata variable produces an error regardless of the variable name. I've tried several things, but I just can't get the data to the view.

If I've totally missed the boat on creating forms tell me. I'm still very new to CI, and have limited coding experience.