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!

Last week while in NYC we dropped in on Adafruit Industries. Run by the brilliant Limor and Phillip, they design and make and sell kits and parts for all your electronic project needs. We're big fans! We're excited they had us sit for a short interview for their great "Ask An Engineer" weekly internet show:

Ask an Engineer 3/19/2011 from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Thanks Adafruit Industries! Totally inspiring to see you guys. They were nice enough to also give us a copy of the latest Wired that Limor is on the cover of (go Limor!) and a Ardino starter kit that we can't wait to begin playing with.

If you want to jump ahead and just watch the interview with us (and not the whole show above) then watch the video below instead. But the whole show is way better, we're so totally buying some of those new color-changing flexible LED strips for our private office library project...

because we can from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Thanks again you two!

Please join us for a happy evening birthday celebration: Frank, our trusty CNC machine, is turning five!

It's time for our regular 2nd-Thursday-of-the-month open house / project salon / OMGBBQWTF called EatFoodTalkShop! We're celebrating the fifth birthday of the beloved robot that changed our lives, launched our business, and has made many wonderful things for us all. I don't know what five is in robot years, but he's well deserving of praise for reaching an important milestone. So we're getting him a cake, and letting him blow out the candles (but NOT cut it).

Please come! When was the last time you went to a birthday party for a robot?

Please drop by and help us eat food, drink libations, and share project stories. We'll be showing off some big new exciting projects we're up to. Frank will strut his stuff as well with a few demos.

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

Thursday, October 14th 2010

6:30PM - 9:30PM

Please note that we've moved!

2500 Kirkham St

Oakland, CA 94607

(510) 922-8846

Click here for the Google Map.

Hope to see you there!

Lost? Lonely? BWC help line: 510-922-8846

So we're pretty crazy about robots. But not as crazy as our good friends Dave & Simone! They organize all sorts of amazing robot events, and we're very excited to announce a special deal they are doing for our blog readers: a 20% discount on advanced tickets for their next event! Robot combat is way fun, it's too bad our robot is a Maker, not a fighter.

Here's the lowdown from Dave:

ComBots invites all BecauseWeCan readers to discounted tickets to "ComBots Cup V", the fifth annual heavyweight robot combat championship. This event highlights the best combat robot teams in America and their 220 pound flame-throwing, blade-spinning, titanium shearing robots of destruction! This year's event is Saturday/Sunday, October 23-24th from 2-7pm at the San Mateo Event Center.

Whether you're a sports fan or techno geek, ComBots puts on the best robot events in the world! If you missed seeing fighting robots at Maker Faire this year, or are longing for RoboGames, here's your chance to see them again. Full details at http://combots.net

ComBots is pleased to offer BecauseWeCan readers a 20% discount on ticket prices (adults normally $20, kids $15). Coupon is only valid for advanced purchases until Oct 20th. Buy tickets at http://combots.net/buy-cc.php and use the coupon code below for your discount when you check-out!

super-sekret robot code: BecauseWeCan

The wonderful Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture series is one of the standard books on Revit. Highly recommended. Put together by this crew of knowledgeable folks, it's currently available from amazon and soon as a downloadable version.

In additional to all the BIM basics, there are extra chapters on all sorts of great work being done via Revit. The one on Revit in the movie industry for set design is stunning! We got to help out on this one too, in that we wrote the extra chapter on BIM-to-CNC fabrication.

So go and grab your copy today!

We're looking for a local (greater bay area) shop with a Shopbot or better. We've got a number of small cutting runs that we're simply too busy to do and would love to send your way! Contact us at us@becausewecan.org

Quick update on how Frank is doing! While we got him back online right quick after the move, the move did give us a chance to address several small gremlins and design flaws in his old base design. Nothing too dramatic, but he's more square and solid than ever now. After that came getting the vacuum system back online:

Again, slight changes. We went from a setup of progressively smaller zones, with the smallest being about the size of a sheet of paper near the X/Y zero. We found we never used the smaller zones by themselves, and that our system doesn't have the pressure to hold things that small anyways. So this time we went with eight big square zones, and it's working wonderfully. Also Frank's gotten some new stickers. Someday we should give him a flame job! Next up are a new system of adjustable stops:

These adjustable stops allow you to setup Frank so that you can simply push a sheet of plywood onto him from the in-feed table, and it's stopped in the same place every time as well as held in place. These in combo with the vacuum system make production cutting a snap, such that we made twenty-four desks in two days.

But by far the best recent upgrade is our new spindle! A spindle is a special cutting head used by CNC machines. It's a motor (a huge servo motor, kinda-sorta) that can turn at very precise speeds (even very slow speeds) with lots of torque. It's also got a neat trick: it hooks to Frank's brain, allowing Frank to control it's speed and power. This will not only make for cleaner and faster cuts, it will also let us cut aluminum and other metals much more easily than before. But it's greatest feature is that it's much, much quieter than our old router, making the shop a much better work environment!

We'll be showing off the improved Frank next month at our forthcoming June open house. Still planning the exact date, but keep mid-June open!

Last weekend we were in North Carolina visiting the birth place of Frank, also known as the Shopbot Headquarters. We went to give a talk at their yearly Jamboree, which is basically a small Shopbot conference. And it was really great! They do satellite Jamborees across the country, so look out for the next one. There were lots of great talks, great tips and interesting people. And lots of Shopbot demonstrations. Our talk was on marketing and how to reach out to potential customers. There is a quick post of the talk here And, the photo below is the new Tyro cutting away. This is their new table top CNC that is not for sale yet, but coming very soon. We were also treated to an afternoon in the Shopbot manufacturing warehouse, where we got to ogle all the blue powder coated parts. Not to mention this new machine set up where they have turned the gantry 90 degrees, now spanning over 8ft and allowing your machine bed to be open on the longer axis. Pretty cool. Note worthy: While we were in the North Carolina Raleigh / Durham area, we went to the new Art Museum, which has just had a major addition and renovation done. It is very cool and worth seeing. And we got some BBQ. Also, very worth doing in NC.

There is only one more day left of the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. If you get the chance to go, check out the booth we made for Unity Technologies. It's hard to miss them on the trade show floor, as they are front and center! And their booth looks a little differently from everyone else's. Instead of the hard plastic and pop-up look of the booths around it, we made them a booth with inviting wooden furniture and a dramatic feel. It's all sustainable materials too! The main elements included: A big big wall with Unity Logos and Flat screens A podium A Standing Reception Desk A Triangular counter table for 3 iMacs A station for 4 iphones Two Long Counter tables for demo stations Six cabinets with signage for their affiliates (shown here standing back to back) Thirteen little stools And a lounge area!

Congratulations to our dear friends (and clients!) Eunice and Daniel for their amazing wedding that we were honored to be a part of. A wedding that made the front cover of the Spring 2010 Martha Stewart Weddings issue!

We've been wanting to post pictures forever, but couldn't until the issue shipped. Expect to see a whole lot more soon here on the blog and under Events. We had a blast working with the very talented Eunice on the design of a flat-pack stage and various signs and props for the event, which we in turn fabricated with our trusty robot Frank.

Click here to see the article!

BIMForum was amazing. We were honored to be included! The presentations were all great. It's certainly wonderful to see the newest developments out there within our industry. As always, the steel fabrication guys are way ahead of the curve. We got to see a presentation from Chris Fischer of Schuff Steel where they talked about going from BIM models (Tekla, in this instance) to their fully automated steel shop, where huge CNC plasma machines and automated conveyer systems process massive steel beams all day long. It's just like we do, except a whole lot bigger and heavier! We also got to hear from my old boss Ken Sanders and a fellow Gensler friend Shawn Geile with a stunning presentation on the epic towers Gensler is working on. One of which was just finished at the LA Live! Center. It was great to see that building complete, as I helped out in the early stages of it years ago when I was still at Gensler. A very complex project that could only be done via BIM, yet a complex project to do with BIM! When it came our turn to talk we focused on our in-house process we use for fully leveraging CNC and BIM together for creative interiors. Happy to say that it went over very well and that we hope to get a video of it up soon. Best thing about the conference was all the new friends we made. There are some amazing people out there doing simply incredible things. Specialty contractors making mountains for Disney, civil engineerings using automated robotic grading machines, huge contractors coordinating whole skyscrapers, to programmers developing totally new ways of collaborating together: across the board, everyone we met was up to something mind-blowing and awesome. We're sad that our schedule won't allow us to make the next one in June. But we certainly hope to go again soon!

So with all the talk recently both in favor of and the rather cynical counter-take on the 'new industrial revolution' I figure that it might be good for someone who's personally involved to share their thoughts as well. Take it for what you will, for this is just my view, but so far most of what I've seen written about it hasn't come from anyone directly involved with it.

So then who am I to talk about it? Well, a few years ago my wife and I bought a CNC routing table without much idea for what to do with it beyond making cool stuff. As a matter of fact, it's the very first blog post on this blog. We'd never even used a CNC machine before, actually never even seen one before in person. But we figured that we could figure it out, and with help from others online and the company we bought it from we got it running. We started making stuff for ourselves. Then friends. Then friend's friends. It blossomed into a business. Pretty soon we quit our day jobs, and now we're even hiring people. We were the first ones to bring a CNC router to Maker Faire. Hell, my wife and business co-founder's picture was on the poster for the first two years of Maker faire. So we're smack in the middle of this 'movement' I think.

Everyone seems to be having a hard time figuring out exactly what to call what we're doing. We've had this problem too. In fact, I have yet to hear anything that really nails it. But this guy comes close with the thought of calling it 'punk manufacturing'.

Let's take a brief look at punk rock then. OK, so just before punk, let's say the mid 70's, to be in a great rock band you'd need to be either a big rock star or a talented virtuoso (or both). Get signed by a big label and all that. Rock music was mostly about big production, big ideas, big marketing, and 15 minute guitar solos.

But then along comes punk. Suddenly, anyone with passion and good ideas can have a great band. Get rich? Probably not. But at least have a chance to be something more than whatever they were before. Have some great stories. Maybe even make enough money to just play music and not have to work some crap job.

And for most that was enough. I mean, heck, leisure for half the people on this planet is a full stomach, so getting to play music for a living, even if it's a lower middle class living, sounds like a hell of a deal to me. Sure, by the second or third wave you had punk bands like Green Day making a killing, and all that big media stuff getting back into it, but even those Green Day guys were starving teenage punks at one point, just playing music because they loved it, and riding that for as long as they could.

So now we've got the 'Makers Movement'. The new industrial revolution. But honestly, it's just a bunch of folks that via new possibilities can do what they have always wanted to do: make stuff. I think that both extremes of the Wired article and Gizmodo's response totally miss the fundamental point: it's really about freedom. Freedom for those of us who have only wanted to make things, to be able to do so, and make enough of a living that we can spend all our time doing what we love.

The sad reality that I have seen today is that anyone interested in making things goes to school for many years with the hope of being able to make fantastic things. Then they graduate, only to work on soul depraving things for years on end. Either pushing lines around in a CAD program drawing bathrooms, or designing headlights to purposely break in around five years. Only after working for a very long time, or playing well at political games, or becoming an academic to support themselves, or being really, really lucky, only then do they even have a chance of being in a leadership role; deciding what's getting made. I know many disheartened engineers, architects, and industrial designers. Once in the real world, they've found that no matter how good their ideas are, or how much passion they have, or how hard they work, it simply dosen't matter. Until they fight their way to the top they aren't going to be doing much other than making someone else's ideas real.

We all went into this wanting to make stuff, and came out not making much of anything.

So along comes cheap hardware, cheap CNC machines, and the Internet. Suddenly, we can all make stuff. All the stuff we've always wanted. And, hopefully, we can find lots of people to make it for. People who love it. Heck, maybe we can even keep our day jobs, and make stuff on the side. Or we can start our own business 100% and see if our ideas will really fly. We can make the stuff that our friends will love. We can make the stuff that we love. It opens up vast new areas. Just like with punk rock, all it takes is an instrument and an idea and you're on your way. Are you going to be a rock star? Get rich? Probably not, but who cares about all that corny self-centered stuff when you're having this much fun simply doing it?

So will it change the world? You know what, us Makers really don't care. We're having too much fun doing what we love. We're free to simply follow whatever idea we've got as far as we can. If you think for a second I'm not going to ride that for all I can, when all I've ever wanted to do in my life is make great things, then you've got a strange idea of how people work.

Honestly, I wonder if the cynical counter-response is partially from someone who's bitter at being stuck at a desk job. What's wrong with a bunch of new small business sprouting up all over America? Small business built this country, small business are the backbone of this country, and frankly, big business have little interest in a lot of local issues. Small businesses are all about local issues. If this movement launches a slew of new small businesses, I think it will indeed have an impact on our world, every bit as much as the Internet has.

The Gizmodo article does raise one very valid point: not everyone is going to be part of this thing. Which is fine, really. Everyone having access to guitars didn't make us all punk rockers. Everyone having access to a computer didn't turn us all into programmers. Everyone having access to a worldwide publishing system didn't make us all interesting bloggers. So everyone having access to manufacturing capability isn't going to make everyone suddenly a professional Maker. And that's OK.

Let's look at it this way: I'm now a small business owner, making a middle-class life for myself, and starting to employ others. While over the last three years the world famous Architecture firm I used to work for has laid off almost half it's staff. Working for a big company is no more stable than what we're doing, and heck, what we're doing seems to be working pretty well so far. It's certainly a lot more fun. I'm adding a lot more value to the overall GDP and my local community now then I was when I was working for that big firm. I'm creating real value, here, in my backyard. And while I loved working at that big firm, and running our own thing is terribly stressful at times, man, I wouldn't go back unless I had absolutely no other choice.

In other words life isn't just about profit, nor is that the only meter one should measure a business with. I feel both Wired and Gizmodo missed the point here: it's about freedom and happiness, plain and simple.

We're honored to be included in this year's BIMForum conference in Phoenix, AZ! We'll be giving a talk about BIM-to-CNC fabrication on Thursday afternoon, January 14th, at 3:15 pm. We'll be focusing a lot on our in-house process we use to go from BIM to Digital Fabrication. We'll also be talking about the big changes that have been recently happening in that space. With a few fun things to show off, we've got high hopes that it will be a great talk!

In the past, CNC machines were used to solve one of two problems: either you needed to make a whole lot of something quickly, or you needed to make something that wasn't easy to make by hand. CNC machines were all about high production rates. And they had to be, for they were ungodly expensive, and the software and know-how even moreso. But now with CNC machines getting cheap enough, and the knowledge widespread enough, so that anyone can use them for almost anything they can think of, well, it really changes the whole game. And that's exactly what were going to be talking all about!

The BIMForum conference is held twice a year by the Associated General Contractors of America, an industry group akin to the AIA or AIGA but for builders. With a focus on emerging technology and it's use in the building industry, BIMForum looks to be wonderful conference of AGC people. People who are really making changes and making things work. So many of these technology-focused building industry talks can wander into the tall reeds of theory. So we're rather interested in talking to a bunch of people who are more about the day-to-day realities of getting things built! We're really looking forward to meeting everyone.

Hope to see you there!

The best little CAM software that could just released a new version! Aspire 2.5 shipped today. We've been helping with the Betas, and are really jazzed about all the new features. The Vectric team rocks! So go get it already, if you haven't already!

Hey, just a quick note: we won the Design Slam at AU 2009! W00t! We'll follow up with a more detailed blog post soon, showing what we did, but wow, we're both excited and humbled by the whole experience. Both HOK and Burt Hill threw down great solutions, and frankly at the end I thought HOK had it in the bag. Maybe my flashy Fluevog Boots I had on that impressed the judges. Honestly though, there is no way I could have possibly won without the support of my whole crew. BWC FTW! Now onto our classes!

Hey there!

Rub your hands together and put your jacket on. It's time to warm your soul at Because We Can!
We'll be cooking up some hot cider (with a nip of something special if you're good), and making little BWC keep sakes.

Come see what we're making! We're not even sure exactly what it will be! But most likely, you'll get to take one home.

Bring some BBQ, snacks or drinks to share.

We still have some small prototype pieces for sale, and we have a ton of Trees from our store available for sale!

So come on by, bring a friend, bring a project, buy a tree, drink some cider!

6:30PM - 10PM at the Because We Can Studio. http://www.becausewecan.org/

Ponoko http://www.ponoko.com/ will be having an open house as well, and showing off some of their samples.

Eat Food Talk Shop
6:30PM - 10PM Nov 12th

BBQ, beer, networking and inspiration.
BYOB and stuff!

at the Because We Can Studio
1722 15th Street
Oakland CA 94607

Please Come!

Tomorrow I'll be part of the AIA TAP conference in Chicago, via teleconference and video!

We were honored to be included in the annual AIA convention this year. Back in April, the San Francisco Digital Design Breakfast Club, an informal local group of designers who get together monthly to talk technology, organized a short Pecha-Cucha style series of short talks for the AIA.

We were invited to give a short presentation on our in-house process, and had a great time boiling that process down into a quick five minute talk. You can see the videos here.

There is a sub-group within the AIA called TAP, or Technology in Architectural Practice, that focuses on uses for new technology and process within our industry and holds a conference from time to time. These talks were part of a mini-TAP conference, as a leadup to their main conferece this month in Chicago.

Much to our delight, some of those videos (including ours) are going to be reshown at that big main TAP conference, and we'll then be on-hand via teleconferencing to answer questions.

That's right Chicago, I'll be a giant head on a video screen tomorrow morning! Mwuhahaha!

Honestly we're really excited to be part of the TAP conference, and are looking forward to it!

Something that we get e-mails about from time to time is how we use Blender with our CNC machine. Everyone wants to know software, formats, etc. The missing link here is something called CAM software.

You don't go directly from Blender to the CNC controller; there is an in-between step where you generate toolpaths for the CNC machine to follow. Blender can't do this directly, and no one has made a plug-in (yet) for it, so you'll need to use a separate CAM package to do the job.

It goes like this. We model something up in Blender, sometimes from scratch and sometimes based upon an imported Revit model. Once we're happy with it, it gets exported to an .STL file. We then import that file into Vetric Aspire. Or, if it's a two or four-sided milling job, we use Vetric Cut3D (which is a nice cheap solution for 3D milling).

Toolpaths are generated by those tools, and saved out into jobs for the machine to run. Then we setup the material on our CNC machine, setup the machine, and then run that job. The machine goes to town, carving away, and then you've got your part!

We've yet to find a decent open source 3D CAM package. And honestly, the features and ease-of-use of the Vectric tools in combo with their cheap (for CAM software) prices really make it the way to go if you're at all serious about what you're making. While we understand that some out there want a 100% open source solution, we're using Blender because we like it and feel that it's got great features, not because it's free.

Anytime we get a question more than once via e-mail, we like to turn it into a blog post, so that we can share the answer with everyone!

Just a quick note, we'll be presenting at this year's Autodesk University in Vegas in December. We're leading two hands-on labs & one open panel:

Model to Marvelous Goes Mental: Realistic Approaches to Photo-Realistic Design Visualization With Autodesk® Revit® 2010

From Fabulous to Fabrication: Real-world Digital Fabrication and BIM

Lean, Last Planner, Agile and Scrum, Oh My! Modern Processes for Production

We're really excited about it! One of the labs is on BIM-to-CNC fabrication, and it is really hands on. Rather than just talking about digital fabrication & BIM, we're actually all going to make stuff. Everyone in the lab is going to get to fabricate their lab model right there at the end of the lab & take it home with them!

AU has been a great learning and networking experience for us. Early registration has just started. Hope to see you there!

Huzzah! We just finished up a conference table for Penny Arcade, and we're totally jazzed about how it came out. Excelsior!

To make it even better, it costs the same as a normal boring 'mid-level' large (it's 16' long) conference table from an office furniture store. Take that, Ikea and DWR.com!

Heck, honestly we were really excited to do something for Penny Arcade. We love their online comic, and we're hoping to make it to PAX someday, but what we really love is the Child's Play charity. Class act all around. We pitched several ideas for their table, and in the end they choose to go with a 'Twisp & Catsby' theme.

We simply loved the two part comic they did with the moon, so we used that dream-like aesthetic as the basis for our table. The table is maple, the inlay of the characters is teak, and the rest is done in colored resin, which really brings the table to life. And in more ways than one, for the moon glows in the dark!

We didn't tell them we were gonna do that. They knew that the moon would be blue, but we also made it glow in the dark (and glow it does, it's pretty bright!) and then just shipped it to them as a surprise! You can see the glow at the end of this 'making of' video we did. Enjoy!

Oh man, this is awesome. Shopbot, the company that made our affordable CNC router, just made their job code open source!

This "Job Code" is the instruction and toolpath code that their machines use. Some call this sort of thing 'NC-Code' or 'G-Code'.

Why this is huge is that there isn't a standard in this world. The closest you get is what people call 'G-Code', which is old, broken, and wasn't ever meant to drive complex CNC machines. 'G-Code' was simply a subset of a computer standard to drive sevro-driven and map-making machines forty or more years ago. There were 'N-Codes' and 'T-Codes' and more, but the 'G-codes' were the ones that made the machine move. So, like 'G53' was a command to make the machine move a certain way. It was standardized in the early 60's, and then didn't change. That controller code was, more or less, hacked for more complex CNC use a loooooong time ago and it's only gotten worse. The G-code for one machine won't work with another machine, there are all sorts of machine-specific codes and controls, and it's not human-readable.

So, enter Shopbot. They decided (wisely I feel) to forgo the whole G-code mess, and instead make their own command structure. SBP, as it's called, is more or less a simple form of Basic or Logo. It's much easier to use, much easier to write or deal with, much easier to read, and has all the things one would want in a proper computer language such as subroutines, loops, inputs, and more.

Until now, that SBP code, while well-documented and publicly available, was copywrited by Shopbot in a typical fashion. While Shopbot was open to others doing neat things with it, there wasn't anything 'official' that said I could, say, write my own SBP generator for Blender and then share it with everyone. Or make a Arduino program that can read SBP jobs and run them on a home-brew CNC machine.

But now, Huzzah! Thanks Shopbot for being so awesome.

So we seem to run into two types of folks a lot: those that don't know how affordable CNC tools have gotten, and those that feel that an inexpensive CNC tool must be junk.

For the first types, yeah, CNC tools are now well below $10,000. As we started our talk with at AU this year, and as others have said, we're in the beginnings of an explosion in personal fabrication. Just as what a consumer-level Laser Printer did for desktop publishing, inexpensive CNC tools are starting to do for fabrication. It's awesome to be part of that!

However, with the second types, I thought I'd just pass along a few ideas that we learned first hand over the last few years:

Our CNC routing table, a Shopbot PRT96 with 4G upgrade (and various hot-rod-mods by us) has joined twitter:

Franktherobot on Twitter

While this is mostly just whimsical fun, it's also nice for us business-wise. Now prior to anyone running a job a Tweet will go off about what Frank's up to so that when one of us is out at meeting we'll still know when Frank is busy, cutting away!

Or when he's bored from cutting too many cabinet jobs... got to keep the robot happy.

Our trusty robot Frank would like to take a moment of silence for it's Mars-exploring brethren Phoenix, who stopped contacting earth earlier today.

It's honestly not hard to fix your own power tools. While the Home Depots of the world would love for you to toss that old broken screwgun and upgrade to a new one, the reality is that it's much cheaper (and better for the environment) to keep the old workhorses in service.