Greetings friends!

Just as a quick introduction, my name is Cynthia L., and I am a part of the mechanical department. Yesterday, we welcomed 2021’s Infinite Recharge at Home! The Narwhals are back at it again to tackle a very strange build season, starting the day off with the FIRST Twitch stream, impatiently waiting for the password to unlock the secrets within game manual. After absorbing all of the content, the rest of the day was filled with discussions, Kahoots, and other wonderful things. Here’s a quick recap of what a few of our departments have been up to!

Mechanical
Today, the Mechanical Department determined the overall course we wanted the robot to take, and split up into sub-system groups. Those groups then roughed out an idea for how their sub-system will function. The groups also created designs of prototypes to test their new ideas, to be built and experimented with over the coming week. The whole department then met to coordinate on how to unify these mechanisms into a cohesive whole.
- Will S.

Controls
Today we ran through all of the changes and updates that were made by the Scheduler, Command, and Subsystem groups went over, concatenated them into a single branch, and merged that into a new branch on the team 2021 repository. We also tested out how to update the actual WPILib installation and libraries to the latest version and got it working for the most part.
- Mason H.

Strategy
Today at Kickoff, Strat…quickly read the Infinite Recharge at Home game manual and created a [K]ahoot to test the team on the just dropped game manual! After lunch, Strat reconvened in our breakout rooms to discuss our direction for build season. We decided to put all our focus on the Game Design Challenge this year and so, we worked on the game design activities to gain insight into designing our game.
- Yash V.

That’s all the news we have regarding Kickoff! We wish you all a swell build season, and we can’t wait to see what the next few months will bring!

For more updates, you can check out our Instagram page at @3128aluminarwhals!