We're excited and proud to once again be included in this year's Maker Faire!

It's so great to have participated every year. This year is talk-a-riffic for us! First you'll find us on Saturday, at 2:30 PM on the Make: Demo Stage giving a repeat from last year: The Secrets of Secret Doors.

Later on Saturday, on the Innovation Stage at 4:00 PM we're on a panel with Jon & Kyrsten and other co-creators of the Serpent Twins. We'll be talking and showing off all about how we made them. We're really excited that the Serpent Twins project we helped with will be at the Faire! You'll probably see us helping unload them and taking a shift of babysitting them during the day.

Then on Sunday, again at 4:00 PM on the Innovation Stage we'll be giving a special 'Ask a Master Maker' panel with a nice selection of experienced Makers to answer your every question! Ask us about projects, going pro, how we did something, or anything else you can imagine!

Looking forward to seeing you at the Faire!

This is a great piece that we designed for a construction company that deals with numerous large drawings.
And we just posted the design of their new office here.

The counter height allows it to be a nice large standing meeting table while reviewing the large drawings, and with the accessibility to pull out another drawing for reference if needed.

The labels on the front are a dry erase material so the naming can be changed quickly and easily.

We designed it in two halves so it could be more easily shipped, and more importantly, fit through the door!

Which allowed us to make some fun joinery details...

It is a great casual meeting table, and a great center piece to the space!

We finally got photos of this project from late last year! We had helped ClifBar out with an internal wall they were building to showcase and promote the philanthropy projects their employees could help out with as part of a company program.

They had a cool idea to show off the different projects available as "menu items", so the diner wall concept was born.

We helped with designing the layout of the wall, sourcing the nessesary items and fabricating the specialty objects.... like these 'ticket takers' made out of old bike wheels!

And this 1950's counter! complete with diner accessories!

And finally, of course, a cool diner sign.

The wall is a well used hit!

Our new postcards from 4x6 showed up recently. And they look great!

Each one showcases a different project that we completed last year, and covers a range of commercial and residential projects and well as a good range of styles.

This is from a residential office project.
A swiveling desk design for a muti functional room. Other elements have since been built:

Next, a commercial project for Anno Domini, a San Jose Art Gallery.
Giant folding, rolling kiosks to expand their usable space:

Then, another residential project of curving stairs and useful but still beautiful storage space in this
Library loft space:

And finally, and internal marketing project with our own in-house library project.

Then, of course you must check out the back!

We've been busy! Too busy to get some of the great projects we've gotten done on our website. So we took a moment, and posted up a few past projects for you to see. Enjoy!

We love coming up with concepts for what companies could do with their offices. It a service we offer, where we're brought in to help brainstorm some big ideas as inspiration.

A few recent examples are helping out Joyent, a cloud software service provider:

We also helped come up with some fun ideas for local hometown heros, Pandora:

And a little longer ago we helped YouTube out with some ideas too:

Now some more tangible office interior elements! We did some signage and branding elements for video game company Envie Interactive. Love that glowing 'V'!

Speaking of games, we also did some early conceptual art & 3D models for their video game:

One area we've really expanded upon is in our architectural services, undertaking some larger buildings. Two examples from last year are the ideas we came up with for a commercial building in SOMA:

And some value-engineering focused redesign of a small live/work loft complex for Oakland:

Now back to work! ;-)

For those Makers that also want nice things, and have wonderful treasures to display, may we introduce... The Secret Maker Superhero Armoire Display Case!

Looks like a regular large glass fronted Armoire you say?
Well watch this...

The sides open to reveal not only access to labeled pull out cubbies, but also, le coup de grâce: hidden pegboard tool and utility belt storage.

Beautiful etched glass and front aluminum detailing by day....

Full on Maker storage by night!

With awesome little cubbies!

This armoire was made for the same room as the Swiveling desks we made a few months ago. More images of the room and all the pieces we've made for it can be seen on the project page.

Thank you all who came to our open house last week and making it an awesome fun event filled with interesting people, robots and Roller Skates!

We'll do Roller Disco again whenever we have the floor space.
Here's our poster shot for next time!

Our comapany mascot, marketing director and cat (we all wear many hats around here) needed a new bed. You know, to hold important meetings in and, well, nap.
So I whipped something up for him the other day.

He seems to enjoy it.
And it jazzes up the office a bit!

The good folks at Maker Faire just launched a new website devoted to the Blue Ribbon winners!

While the Faire started in 2006, in 2007 they got the great idea to hand out blue ribbons as awards to the best projects that year. Just like a state fair!

We won big in 2007 with our Artgolf project, getting five blue ribbons and entertaining an army of kids. We've also gotten ribbons in 2008 & 2009 for Artgolf revisions & other projects.

Last few years we've just given a talks, like the one we did last year on the secrets of secret doors, and talks aren't eligible for ribbons!

Frankly we're honored and humbled to be recognized by such a wonderful group of people. See you at the Faire this year!

March 2nd is First Fridays in Oakland (i.e. the 'Murmur) and we are joining in the fun!

We are opening our doors for Because We Can's quarterly open house.

We'll be starting early at 5PM and going until 8PM.

Come on by!

We currently have 2,000 square feet of open concrete floor behind our studio, so bring your roller skates! Really no fooling.

Come meet and greet the designers of Because We Can, Jillian & Jeffrey, as we show off some of our recent projects, including a San Francisco bar design, a San Diego office design, and some local residential work.

We'll have food, homebrewed beer, we've got some new toys to play with, and we've cleaned up the place. Maybe the BWC band will even play!

Kids welcome, but it is a shop and a party. Lots of sharp corners. And they might learn some interesting new words. You have been warned!

Friday, March 2st

5PM - 8PM

2500 Kirkham St
Oakland, CA 94607
(510) 922-8846

Click here for the Google Map.

Our friends Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft over at the D-School of Stanford have released a new book, and we are in it! The book is called Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration and is available for purchase on Amazon.

It is a book all on making interesting spaces, and each project in the book is very thoroughly outlined from original inspiration and need, to design to fabrication.

For the book we used an in house project of our downstairs library space, as seen here in the finished phase. Pick up a copy and check out the whole project!

It's so nice and pretty to work with aluminum.
Here, a wood backed aluminum sign with acrylic spacer for the floating bits.

This sign is for our ongoing clients over at Clifbar.
Here is some of the other work we have done for them, and some more recent stuff.

We just love how nice and clean this came out, and the font is super cool too!

Soon to come: photos of this whole completed project!

We've just put up our tree in the office!

Decorated the library....

And put lights on our robots!

Happy Holidays from all of us at BWC!

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Jeffrey McGrew, our principal and co-founder, gave a keynote speech at Autodesk University this year! The whole keynote is embedded above, and Jeffrey's on around 24 minutes in.

Core 77 also transcribed his speech, and posted it on there blog, with a nice little forward.

We're very proud to announce that our own Jeffrey McGrew will be giving one of the keynote presentations at this year's Autodesk University.

With over 9,000 people attending, this is very exciting news indeed! We'll be briefly sharing the story of Because We Can and some of the work we've done. Buy a robot and change the world!

We're also giving a more formal hour long presentation on 'The Five Myths of Digital Fabrication'. We'll cover the five most common mistakes (and how to avoid them) that we see people make when they first get into making things via Digital Fabrication.

We'll also be doing a bonus talk, more informal, in The Lounge about how we made the tails for the Serpent Twins (that we made a recent Instrucable for).

We hope to see you in Vegas!

We are renovating a historic building in Southern California to be an office building and machine shop. It is a big fun project! And we are finalizing the design concepts now.

Here is the facade of the building, a cleaned up and renovated version of the current existing historical building. To the right is the building's parking lot and on the left is the enclosed patio and then machine shop.

The machine shop facade echos the office building in shape, but then plays with different materials. We are making the designs here very solar conscious, which is why we have the slats in front of the windows. Due to the intense sun down there, we feel it is necessary to optimize shade with the exterior treatments so the interior cooling of the buildings can be at a minimum.

Here the conference room looks out onto the patio, which is shaded with greenery and stretched fabric shades. We are designing the whole interior, patio and much of the furniture for this project... so stay tuned for more updates on that!

Our good friends over at the Instructables asked us if we wouldn't post up how we made the Serpent Twin's tails. So here it is!

Enjoy! It's our first big instructable so we'd love for you to go there and leave us a comment on it.

Also, if you want to see the Serpent Twins in person, there is a big party this weekend at Jon's shop. All are welcome!

Come to East Bay Mini Maker Faire this Sunday!

Use this code and get a discount on tickets: BECAUSEWECAN
You can buy tickets here

Use that code and get 15% off tickets for the event on Sunday, October 16th
at the Park Day School campus + Studio One Art Center in the Temescal district of Oakland

We'll be there!
& hope to see you there!!!

This Friday - Oct. 14th - 6PM to 10PM
2500 Kirkham St, Oakland

We are having a Halloween Open House, and all are invited!

WATCH! As a giant robot moves using the powers of E-Lec-TricitY.... and CUTS! everything in it's path!

MARVEL! As EVIL Professor Kitty SHREDS! another office chair!

COME! To West Oakland! and see some ART in progress!!!

It will be horrifying in the best way.
Hope to see you here!

Because We Can
2500 Kirkham St.
Oakland
510-922-8846

Costumes and extra drink welcome!

Our good friends over at Envie Interactive have created an amazing interactive environment that you can (and should!) go play in online. It's called VIE, and it is free to play!

But they came to us to for help creating an environment for themselves in this world.

Distressed Patina Aluminum letters with a nice back shadow display their company name when you first walk through the doors.

And to accompany the signage, a glowing 'V' in the shape of their logo. The 'V' encases an LED flexible tube light that mimics neon, but never gets hot and uses hardly any power. We love that!

It is a dramatic symbol that is seen from the font door in its glowing majesty.

Cryptic slabs of stone with 'ancient' secret messages were created to be found in the game.... and in reality!

It's now as cool a place to work as it is online!

Because We Can showed up on the East Bay Mini Maker Faire site the other day in a cool article about what we will be presenting at the Faire on October 16th.

What's that? You've never heard of East Bay Mini Maker Faire? (or... EBMMF??)
Well this is its second year and it is super fun!
One day only, October 16th, in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland.
You can find all the deets on it here.

We hope to see you there!
It's a great collection of local Makers. And though it's not as big as the big official MakerFaire, is's certainly big enough to keep your interest for one day. See you there!

A couple months ago we signed on to help with Form & Reform's project for the Burning Man festival: The Serpent Twins project. After a very busy few months (and one very dusty adventure!) they came together wonderfully.

The final two fully-drivable serpent sculptures not only look amazing, they are filled with color-changing LEDs. Color and video routines can play down their entire length, creating stunning effects. With a full sound system and accelerometer built into each head, the lights can also change and react depending on the movement and sound as they drive along.

One of the main parts we helped out with were the tails.

While the heads were largely handmade, the tails were fully digitally fabricated. It took a combination of software tools to make this happen. The graceful original form was modeled in Revit, bulkheads and bolts then rationalized in Inventor, and the skin unfolded in Rhino. The digital files for the entire thing were sent out for high-definition CNC plasma cutting. The internal frame slotted together, welded, and then the skins were bolted on. The 'carvel' style skinning lends the tails a very viking ship look and construction, while the fasteners and finishing fit into the overall aviation-theme.

The sheet metal skins of the tails are bolted around a bulkhead frame...

And then attached to their own trailer, where we hide the batteries and generator.

We also designed and milled the thick acrylic decorative glowing medallions to adorn the sides of the serpents.

The white Serpent's body is made up of white plastic barrels that glow from within with LEDs. And the black Serpent has black metal barrels with scale designs plasma-cut cut into them, allowing the same LED light-show to glow ominously. We made many templates, jigs, and fixtures via our CNC machine to help support the largely hand-made processes Form & Reform's traditional blacksmithing demands.

Each head is built on small electric car that is super fun and easy to drive, and all the barrels track so perfectly that you can weave in and around people and things in a most snake-like way. But of course, you must be wearing a winged aviator cap to operate these vehicles! As Kyrsten Mate so fashionably displays...

Check out more photos on Flickr!

UPDATE: Now with video! Here's a nice movie showing how wonderfully they move.

Just posted to our projects page, the rolling, fold up kiosks we made for Anno Domini Art Gallery in San Jose.

They have debuted at the San Jose first Fridays, and will be a regular there, so go check em out sometime!

Here they are all folded up during the day:

This is the cool wall on the back of Anno Domini, also worth checking out!

And here they are getting shipped!

check out our project page of these for more photos & info!

This Friday, join us in downtown San Jose for another ArtCar Fest!

We will be hanging out around the awesome gallery AnnoDomini, and the cool cars will be in the parking lot right next door.

We recently made these giant rolling art kiosks for the gallery, come check em out!

Cool cars like this one from Jon Sarriugarte, Form & Re-Form will be there (yup, that's a car seat in the front).

And definitely this totally awesome one from the artist Philo, co-founder of Envie Interactive.

Here is a good article to read if you need to get inspired to go.

Hopefully we will see you there!
6PM-11PM
Anno Domini Gallery
366 South First Street San Jose, CA 9511