May 2020 – Kyle Cothern

May 25, 2020May 25, 2020

The Return of the Space Cowboys.

The sun sets on the cape. Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This week after over a decade of development, some of my dearest friends are launching people into space. I only worked with them for a couple years, but they’ve touched my life in so many ways and we’ve stayed friends since. I’ll never forget the excitement of my first launch.

I’m rooting for them, and for humanity.

LETS GET BACK UP THERE! GO FALCON GO DRAGON! ( I love you guys. )

Crew Dragon Dress Rehearsal– Credit: SpaceX

~10 years ago I got a call out of the blue from Tom H, structures recruiter for Space Exploration Technologies, a company I’d never heard of in Los Angeles. I was really into robotics and never had an interested in rockets (they’d been done before, or so I thought). But Tom was interested in me, and what I’d done in college ( built a humanoid robot ), so he talked my ear off for about an hour and asked me all sorts of questions about my background.

May 17, 2020May 18, 2020

Oberth Arm: Don’t skip arm day, the plotter.

Now that the cube is done, I’m resurrecting an old project. I’ve finally got enough stuff out in the garage to prototype my way out of an aluminium box. You can read the original arm writeups over on Hackaday.io for more detail, but In a nutshell it’s a really big, really fast, really accurate polar plotter arm

May 14, 2020May 17, 2020

Tools: Calipers

Well I have a shop in the garage so I figure I should start blogging about useful tools. This is the first post in a series of common (and uncommon) tools you’ll find in a machine shop.

The most useful tool, for a Mechanical Engineer anyway, seems to be a pair of calipers. I don’t leave home without them. I have 4 pair in my toolbox alone.

May 10, 2020May 17, 2020

Making Swarf #3: Productive Pandemic

Too many zoom calls. Hacker Drinkup with a cube theme.

On Lockdown

Hadn’t used the P100 respirator since the fires last year

That was an interesting 3 months. I was planning on publishing weekly blogs but I had a lot in my life change very rapidly, so I took a break from writing. In the midst of bringing the garage shop online, starting a business formally ( swarf.io ), and interviewing for jobs, a pandemic started and I got exposed to a friend who got the ‘rona. I’ve been on lockdown since (starting around Feb 28th). Luckily I never got sick, but now I’m busier than ever.