Shopbot

Renew! With new digs, comes new changes, and one is that Frank has been rebuilt into a heavy metal monster.

The Green Livin' blog TreeHugger is promoting a really cool campaign of 'downloadable design', and we're honored to be included! TreeHugger approached several small-time designers working in flat-pack and sustainable furniture design. They asked us all to scale down one of our designs to little cute 1/6 scale versions that could be downloaded as a PDF, printed out, and then cut out of paper. Here's our Squirrel Table:

Cute huh? The big idea here is that in the future, you'll be able to just buy a design like you do a music track on the iTunes music store, and then either fabricate it at home or visit your friendly local CNC production shop and have it made. No shipping, close to home, local economies, local materials, custom-made stuff that fits needs better (and is less likely to be landfill-bound). A very Green way to deliver on custom design and to empower folks to have more interesting and engaging surroundings. Two things we're 100% behind!

There is a new company, Ponoko, that is already working to set up a network of CNC shops, Designers, Material Suppliers, and Customers to deliver on this idea. Exciting times, and right in line with some of what we're working hard on here at Because We Can!

We're so into this idea that we're partnering up with TreeHugger and running a contest where anyone can submit their design, which will be reviewed by a panel of judges, and the winning one we'll turn into a ready-to-cut file and fabricate for the lucky winner! Submit your designs here, we can't wait to see what folks come up with!

Not much of a designer? Then we've got another mini-contest for you! Download our mini table, cut it out, and then photograph it on your desk, or home, on your cat's head, or whatever other cool place you can think of. If you e-mail or send us the best photo by the end of October, we'll ship you a real life full-size Squirrel Table of your choosing! Get snipping!

Every mini-golf course needs a dinosaur. And who are we to do otherwise?
However, this being a mini-golf course for the Austin, Texas Maker Faire, well, a little dino just won't do. Wouldn't be proper, even at three feet tall.

We recently hooked up with Attaboy and made boxes for his "Qwezshuns", a collectible cast toy. This toy is even more collectible than his others as he is only making 20, they are all individually hand painted and come in a custom box that is also hand painted by Attaboy. You cant get much more collectible than that.

The Qwezshun sneaks a peek out of his box.....

So we don't use Sketchup. Sadly. It's such a great little tool, and does so much, and is a lot of fun to work with. But for what we do we've found Revit to be a better fit. However, our good friends over at Zomadic use it. A lot. And, being that Rob over there has some good Ruby chops, well they wrote their own plug-ins for generating the job files straight from the Sketchup models. Even better yet, they recently released their plug-ins as Open Source, meaning they are now free for all!

Check it out: http://code.google.com/p/zomadicam/

The way it works is via custom right-click menus, it allows you to 'clone' parts out of your Sketchup models and toolpath them. Way cool stuff.

Now, it's Open Source, and works well for Rob but it's not a complete, ready-to-go solution. But for those willing to get their hands a little dirty, what better thing to work on than making Sketchup generate actual real stuff?

Being summer time and living in beautiful sunny Oakland, we recently got a large shade structure to put in our yard to shield us from that blazing beauty in the sky. But once we had the shade structure up it was painfully obvious what was now missing. What was once just a plot of dusty dirt, was now crying out for a deck.

A DECK!

So we answered the call, and built a deck in three days.

Our faithful assistant Dennis levels the blocks in the ground....

So we've been busy re-doing the shop some, trying to make it a bit more efficient in work, tool, and material flow. In other words, we're tired of running into each other or moving the pile of scrap yet again when trying to get things done! Most of it is boring, putting up new shelves, moving stuff around, that sort of stuff. But there is a few things worth mentioning:

Woo, been so busy that January and February just disappeared! Jillian just posted about where the months went. For those of you out there that just read my blog, you should aim your RSS readers over to here instead so you get all the bloggy goodness.

So now that our huge deadline for Three Rings has passed, I'm able to get back to some of the smaller projects we've had in the wings. One of them was to try to see if we could teach the robot to do custom ground finishes on aluminum, something typically called an 'engine polish'. Check it out!

No, the robot hasn't turned evil. Yet. That devil is a test for some cutting work we might be doing for a friend. Here's a close up.

So this was just doing a typical grid pattern. Next we're going to try doing some more random, some truly random, and some swirly patterns as well...

One of the coolest things about our CNC routing table is that it's fully upgradeable and hackable. One very recent example of this is the new 'brain' we just got for it.

The 'brain' in this case is the controller box for the CNC table. It controls and provides the voltage to the stepper motors that move the CNC table's cutting tool around. You hook a computer up to it, via USB (I love that it's USB), and by running the Shopbot control software feed it jobs to cut. Think of it as a '3D print spooler'. Now, this 'brain' is simply mounted in a modified beige PC case. Here's a picture of the old one.

This is the one that came with the Shopbot originally. It worked fine, but it was kinda slow. We could only cut at about 2-4 inches per second, and 'jog' (that's when it's quickly moving to the next cut over the top of the material) at about 4-5 inches per second...

As you can see the new controller board is much larger. Those big black slabs are the 4 Geckodrive 202 stepper drivers. These not only supply more voltage to the stepper motors (making them go faster) it also sends that power with more 'pulses' for finer resolution. See, the old board drove the motors at a 4:1 (that's four pulses per move) and this one does 10:1. This makes it cut smoother. It also makes the stepper motors not 'groan' anymore (they made some great noises) which is a big of a shame, for that was an endearing characteristic and part of why we named the CNC table 'Frank'. This board can also take a fifth one, so when we get another axis we can drive that too.

It was an easy swap, no different from swapping a motherboard on a old PC. Shopbot uses a lot of off-the-shelf parts to make it easy to fix and upgrade these machines, something we really dig.

Here I am finishing the install...

The only 'hairy' thing was adjusting the voltage. See, while it's just a normal PC case, with a normal power supply in the back, there is a second power supply in the front of the case for the stepper motors. You've got to turn this up a notch to get the full effects of the upgrade.

But man, what an upgrade! We're cutting at 6 inches per second now, and jogging at about 12. That's a foot a second! Things that took 30 minutes to an hour now take 15 minutes or less. It's a big jump, we can now screw up faster than before. We've also got to hold down things more now as well, for the motors move with a lot more force, which tries to push things around more when they are cutting. But it's so great to have be able to simply double or efficiency in about 15 minutes of work...

The interior space we are building out for Three Rings is now Phase One complete. We have painted the walls and put up the first half of the arches, screens and window treatments, and completed the first round of desks. There are still a few more details to complete, like custom hanging lamps coming off each arch, and fancy Victorian CPU holders, but this section is mostly done.

Here are two design drawings we presented to Three Rings:

And here is the same view of the finished arches:

View from the other direction:

We are using the Arches to define areas, and then adding in "screens" to separate work areas from 'hang out' areas.

All of these pieces are designed in Revit and Illustrator , then brought into ArtCam where they are made into 'Part Files'.

We use Revit because of it's phasing abilities, its ability to be parametric, and how easily it allows us to work in front of the client, changing and re-arranging designs in real time.

After the designs are made into 'part files' we set up the parts to be cut by our ShopBot.The decorative pieces you see here were all cut out of a 3/4 inch Pine.

We helped the client choose colors for the walls, the arches and screens, and even had a big party where the employees at Three Rings put on painting clothes and helped paint!

On these large circles we are designing 3D carvings that will be carved by our Shopbot and painted gold, then mounted on the circle.

We also made desks for the Artists that will be sitting here. The artists all sent us sketches in Illustrator files, based on a template that we designed and provided. We then fabricated and finished each custom desk for the artist that sketched it. It was a great collaborative process.

And a dramatic photo of the Cthulhu desk.....

Here is a drawing of our design for then completion of a single 'work pod'

And finally, the same space in real life, in use by cowboys.

Now it has it's final desk placements, curtains and fancy furniture. Yee-Haw!