Engineering as a hobby
As a professional engineer, you are often put in high level positions that don’t allow you to work with hardware and get your hands dirty as much. For that reason, I find it important and rewarding to work on my own engineering projects, outside of work. It’s a great way to keep my skills sharp and get my hands dirty.
Model Rocketry
Building and launching model rockets is one of the most rewarding ways to sharpen your engineering skills. Kits are a great way to start, but designing and building your own rockets is where the real learning happens. Can I make this rocket twice as long? Can I add a second stage? How would I go about clustering 3 engines together? How would I make them all light simultaneously? Could I ditch the fins, and use thrust vectoring for control? These are the problems that I love trying to solve as I design and build model rockets.
Robotics and Autonomy
Technology is growing exponentially. As I have learned from experience, taking some controls classes in college and learning how to write some basic computer code just isn’t enough to keep up with the pace. In addition to reading about the latest breakthroughs in machine learning and system autonomy, I find it incredibly useful to work on writing my own algorithms to operate autonomous hardware. A simple way to write scripts in Python to control a rover using a Raspberry Pi circuit board. Eventually, I plan to design more complex autonomous rovers and ultimately autonomous drones.
3D Printing
In the past 10 years, 3D printing has completely taken over the engineering world. Companies like Rocket Lab and Blue Origin are 3D printing critical rocket components, including rocket engines. Relativity Space is 3D printing entire rockets! Because it has taken the world by storm, 3D printers are relatively affordable for use in home projects. You can learn a lot by creating a CAD drawing for a piece of hardware, printing that object and then integrating it into your system. As much as I love cardboard, plastic, glue, scissors, knives and tape, the projects described above become a lot cooler with access to a 3D printer.
Current Project
High Altitude Balloons
I am currently in the early stages of planning a high-altitude balloon launch. I am interested in launching a scientific payload and a camera to about 90,000 feet (hopefully) with a weather balloon. This combines my passions of engineering, space, art, science and astrophotography. I would love to capture my own images of Earth from the edge of space, and gather some scientific data in the process.