It’s February, and along with the days getting colder, the GRS Idea Lab is getting busier, as we’re happy to say that we’re meeting in person again! We’re building a robot. The CAD designs we started last summer are finished, and we have sent some of those parts to our sponsor, Quality Tool, to get them fully made! In addition, we’ve been machining some of the parts ourselves.
While our build team is busy making the robot, our amazing programming team is busy programming it. We are especially proud of our newest programming recruits, as they have started the process of coding their very first robot. We are getting ready to send out electronics boards to them to practice on.
The lovely operations team is hard at work making future plans for build season and beyond. We have applied for a diversity grant so that we can have workshops to make this team a more diverse and inclusive space.
Finally, the team has started meeting as a whole on the first friday of every month to keep us all informed and cohesive.

Well, build season has officially started, and it started with a bang! Yesterday (January ninth,) we had an all-team meeting to kickoff the build season and the game for 2021.
We started off with introductions, then played a Kahoot to test our knowledge of the game. After that, we watched the official live kickoff video from FIRST that went over the challenges for this year. There are still a lot of unknowns, with the ongoing pandemic, but we at NoMythic are ready for whatever comes our way in 2021.
After a lunch break where we each looked over the game manual and at-home-guide, we reconvened to go over any questions we had about the rules for the game. After that, we discussed whether we wanted to focus on a robot designed more for the at-home challenges or the competition. We eventually came to the conclusion that we wanted to focus on the smaller things designed for the at-home challenges. We then broke into breakout rooms to discuss what we wanted the robot to be like, and to ensure we knew about each challenge. Finally, we came back together for the last ten minutes of the meeting to recap and set our work to do before the next team meeting.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us in 2021, but we at 2491 NoMythic are looking forward to the hardest fun ever.

We’re currently working with the incredible robotics team KnightKrawler to make face shields for front line workers. We have access to several 3D printers, some owned by the team, some owned by mentors, which we are using to print the frames for face shields. If you are able and interested we are currently accepting donations to help us pay for the filament at our Donate page. If you need face shields, or just want to check out the amazing KnightKrawler and the work they’re doing, you can do so on their website.

Even though we’re no longer seeing each other or our robot in person, we’re still a team. We’ve moved our meetings online and have been meeting as a whole team once a week, and it’s been wonderful to see everyone’s faces and hold on to our community when so much else is different. Sub-teams have been having some additional meetings for their work. All of our sub-teams have been using this time for some infrastructural improvements, such as our student handbook, annual calendar, a programming style guide, and training all around. Our Build team has also been working on a few robot-related projects in CAD (Computer-Aided Design), which revolve around changes we would like to make to our robot in the future. One of these is modifying the shooter hood to be adjustable, while others include our climber and intake mechanisms.