Introducing Blue Twilight: Team 2220

At about 10 AM on Sunday November 22, a group of students from Eagan High School (Eagan, Minnesota) strolled into the Cub Foods (a popular supermarket chain in upper midwest) on Diffley Road, about three blocks away from their school. Spanning out behind the checkout lines, the students approached the customers and inquired if they’d like their groceries bagged. If someone said, “Yes,” they would then pack his or her purchases and help load the bundle onto the waiting van. Should the customer feel inspired to reward them, they’d direct him or her to the tipjar on a table by the exit.

(If you live in California like I do, you’re probably used to having your poultry and produce bagged by a store clerk without asking, but in the midwest, specifically at Cub Foods in Eagan, you’re expected to roll up your sleeves and pack them yourselves, I’m told.)

The Eagan high school students who volunteered to fill Cub Foods bags with canned goods and cereal boxes belong to FIRST Robotic Team 2220, also known as Blue Twilight. Come April 2010, instead of packing produce, they hope to pack a punch—a robotic punch—at the Minnesota 1,000 Lakes and North Star FIRST regional championship competitions.

Blue Twilight team members spent their free Sunday afternoon hauling grocery bags because, even with several staunch corporate sponsors, 2009 proves a lean year for fundraising. Last year, the team started raising funds late, but by November, they’d collected enough to cover their anticipated expenses. “But it’s been tight this year,” acknowledged Ed Anderson, the team’s CAD mentor.

In summer, some of them peddled hot dogs in front of Von Hanson, a local meat market, for $1.50 to $2 a piece. (They had the merchant’s blessings. In fact, the merchant donated the lunch meat they needed to make hot dogs.) Others worked for roughly 6 to 7 hours in the concession stand of a nearby amusement park, then put their paychecks into the general funds for the team.

For concept design, the team uses PTC‘s Pro/ENGINEER CAD software. CAD mentor Ed Anderson recalled, “[Last year,] our use of CAD was primarily documentary; Alex [his son, also a Pro/E user and Blue Twilight member] took a lot of measurements of the in-progress robot, and made the model from those ... after we shipped the robot, we were able to withhold 35 pounds of material [according to the rules of the competition], which we used to fashion a key piece of the robot, and we needed to refer often to the CAD model to determine the space this piece had to fit into ... when the regionals arrived, and it was time to mate that final piece to the rest of the robot, and it fit almost perfectly, [team members] were both relieved and justifiably proud of their efforts.”

Throughout the build season and the competition in 2010, I plan to follow the adventures of Blue Twilight. And I invite you, dear readers, to do the same. The team has graciously agreed to share with me their concepts and designs in progress, in return for the feedback they might get from professional product designers. Who knows? Maybe some of you stress-test specialists and FEA analysts might even be able to help them refine their model so it can withstand the onslaught in the arena.

This is actually a revision of a previous idea. In June, I issued “An Open Call for a Design Case Study,” with the aim to follow a project from concept to manufacturing. Unlike one of those read-it-and-then-forget-about-it case studies, I’d hoped to create one that was ongoing, deriving its drama from the highs and lows of the project itself.

Alas, I found no takers. Most people expressed enthusiasm for it, but didn’t see how they could convince their clients to let them publicly discuss products that were still in development. So my plan for a living case study seemed, in Charles Dickens’ words, “dead as a doornail.”

Now, with the help of Blue Twilight, I plan to resurrect it. I’ll call the new series of post “Twilight Robotic Adventures.” (And if this title somehow ends up attracting fans of Stephenie Meyer’s teenage vampire saga Twilight, so be it.)

Build Season begins in early January. Let’s root for Blue Twilight!