At the end of the 2022 school year I came across the opportunity to work as a
freelance writer for a manufacturing company called SendCutSend. I had initially
worked with them in 2020 to get my robotics team a first-of-its-kind partnership with them that
ended up bringing over 50 FIRST robotics teams to their customer base. Then as my
Senior year came to a close I got an email for a job application and got the job. I
now write informational articles providing advice and insight into how to use their
service. While it's been a rather untraditional job for someone my age, it's been a
really exciting experience to be able to apply and get paid to present the knowledge
that I've gained in robotics over the last decade. While I may not know what it's
like to work a traditional fast food job like most kids my age have experienced and
endured, I couldn't be happier with the entrepreneurial nature and the connection to
engineering that all of my gigs, side-hustles, and jobs have provided me with over
the last few years. To date, I've written articles covering small scale designes, various material offerings, manufacturing tolerances, and more.
Here are a few of the articles that've been published so far:
Design Advice For Small Scale Applications
This was my first article and was based on all of my experience with robot
design since I started using CAD back in 2016. When I was training a new
design member on one of my teams, this was basically the advice I would give
them.
One of the most confusing things with 2D design especially with lasercutting is tolerances. These machines are incredibly precise and yet require and immense amount of care and attention to ensure the part in an assembly fit together as needed. With this article, the aim was to explain that with visual aids and examples rather than just numbers on a data sheet.
Writing about materials was something I had no experience with causing the
approach I took to writing this article to be quite unusual. Instead of just
going off of wikipedia for material properties, I took the data provided by
my employer, learned about what it all meant, and then presented that
understanding to the reader in the same way I learned it with cheat sheets
to help them understand better. This was a lot of fun and I ended up writing
a series of (currently unpublished) articles in the same format for other
types of materials.
This article was a continuation of the sheet plastics article above and therefore looks very similar. Over time, I'm working through SendCutSend's entire material catalog and writing these articles for each material group. They provide a lot of valuable information to customers and present it all in one, concise article rather than having to scour the internet for it.
I've done a couple of articles like this that are more simple and mundane
but are still very challenging to write as they have to be detail oriented.
In CAD there are a lot of long, tedious processes like this where one wrong
move and the entire thing doesn't work so having very clear guides are
extremely useful.