Stage 1 of the 'Hot Sharp Toxic' room. This swiveling desk is the first stage of a larger project to turn a room in a private residence into a splendid mad science lair. More pictures here and on Flickr.

Check out our build video, where we show off the process we used to make these fantastically inlayed desks!

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.

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!

We are presenting a few talks at AutoDesk University this year. It's next week! One of the talks we are giving is on modeling to fabrication. We'll be making little physical prototypes in class. But of course we wont have time in class to make all 80 of them (one for every one). So we're making a bunch of them in advance. That way we can hand the parts out in class, and everyone gets to put one together. Here's frank in action.... cutting out all those little parts!

That's right! We've made the Wikipedia puzzle globe in 3D! No glasses required.

We started out with a 3D model, manipulating the globe in Blender to be flattened so it could hang against a wall.

After creating a satisfactory version, we "sliced" the model in our CAM software, and set up the job to be cut on our CNC machine, Frank.

Using Trupan, a certified sustainably harvested fiber board that is very soft and mills well, we first made a prototype. Always, always first make a prototype.

Here at BWC, we only use certified sustainably harvested woods, as we want to ensure there will be those far in the future making wonderful things like this. As you can see from the prototype, the globe was milled on the machine in horizontal slices, then built up into it's final shape. We created the globe to have two removable puzzle pieces. You can see one here in the final large version...

At this point the globe has been glued up and sanded down. Next, many repetitions of primer, sealing and sanding occurred, which eventually gave us this:

A smooth surface, with the letters and the puzzle piece lines well formed. A full day and a half of hand painting was next up. We wanted the globe to have a very rich, tactile look to it. Hand painting is the only way.

The letters and puzzle lines were painted in with meticulous care. The final globe has two removable puzzle pieces, and is coated with a waterborne lacquer to protect it from greasy finger prints. (We only use water based and water borne finishes here at Because We Can)

And now for a quick demonstration:

The Wikipedia Globe in 3D, brought to you by Because We Can!

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!

Back in April, we were invited to give a brief talk at the AIA conference in San Francisco. You can download the video here, and the slides are available as a PDF here. No embed, sorry, don't know why the AIA site decided to go with a download for the video.

The talk is a five-minute overview of the five-step process we use here at Because We Can to make stuff, and we're pretty happy with how it came out.

While the AIA puts on a different conference just for technology-focused topics called TAP, for Technology in Architectural Practice, they also had a 'mini-TAP' if you will during the main larger AIA conference.

The San Francisco Digital Design group, an informal breakfast club we're part of, did a group presentation as part of that 'mini-TAP'. It was a http://www.pecha-kucha.org format, i.e. 20 slides with 20 seconds per slide, with ten different people presenting. We were excited and honored to be one of the presenters, as our other nine co-presenters were all terribly smart and experienced experts. I highly recommend watching all the presentations!

Wow, what a great time. Maker Faire just keeps getting better!

This probably was our best year yet. Artgolf made a ton of kids really happy while surviving admirably.
Making something to survive the onslaught of several thousand seven year olds is chock full of lessons!

It also took home two blue Editor's Choice ribbons. Which we wouldn't have been able to do without our Artgolf volunteers.
Thanks for rocking everyone!

The addition of the 'space invader foosball' was a big hit with everyone.
The Maker Faire Artgolf course all folds up, packs away, and is now on it's way to storage, waiting for the next event.

We also had a booth in the Expo hall, showing off our stuff and selling our little collectable robots.

We had a bunch of fun mustaches-on-a-stick that were left over from a friend's wedding we made a bunch of stuff for.
They proved to be quite popular, selling out before noon on the first day and popping up in lots of people's photos.

We made these great panels to envelope our booth and to show off the more 3D sorts of things we do.

And being masters of flat-pack, everything in the end broke back down and was easy to ship back home!

Thanks again everyone, this was our best Faire yet!

When you throw something away it just goes someplace else.

Our shop produces a fair amount of scrap. We only use sustainably harvested or recycled materials and water-based finishes. The CNC process we use optimizes materials a great deal. Some of our scrap even winds up in the work of local artists. However, we still wind up with quite a lot that has to be tossed, and that means something is getting wasted, if only energy.

Or is it? Instead of just throwing our waste into the dump, or worse just burning it all, we drop it off at the green waste processing center for Alameda County!

While it sure doesn't look pretty, the end result is pretty neat. First off, a lot of the wood waste is used to make biomass fuels.

What doesn't make good fuel gets made instead into mulch for gardens and landscaping. Which they sell cheap and give away to cities for projects.

What doesn't work for fuel or landscaping winds up in a giant compost for organic materials out in central California.

While it's not as neat as building a downdraft gasifier and then running a generator from that to power the shop, it's a lot better than it all just going to dead landfill.

So while reusing something is better than buying new, you should feel guilt-free in your purchase of heirloom quality furniture from our store. For what little waste we do produce is dealt with as responsibly as we're able to do currently, and we're always looking to do better!

Hey! We're all set up and rocking here at Maker Faire 2009. Our booth is in the Expo hall, over on the right if you're facing the Exploratorum's big setup in the center. We've got Maker Faire specials on our wooden robots and our new Pulse Table. Artgolf is here too, out on the grass over by one of the beer tents. Drop on by!

We are heavy users of Building Information Modeling. We not only share as much information as we can early in the process, we also directly fabricate parts of the project from the very same models. Parts we sometimes hand off to contractors for installation, sometimes it's even just templates and jigs that help the contractor install things faster or better. Anyways, we're very open and share tons across the board with those we work with.

We just gave a talk on what we do at the TAP preview that's part of the larger AIA convention that just breezed through town. When we give talks on what we do, and how we work, we always get one or two Architects saying something to us along the lines of "well, that's great you can work that way, I could never do that because of all the liability" or "if I share my models, I'll just get sued".

While those concerns are legitimate, I do feel that they are overblown. People always fear the unknown, and this whole BIM / IPD workflow is pretty new and uncertain. CNC production is almost jetpack-future territory. However, getting sued over sharing a CAD file or a BIM model with a contractor or fabricator I think is a bit of a boogyman. I have yet to hear of someone getting sued over it, yet everyone is scared of it!

Honestly, the elephant in the room I feel is in the Contract Administration, the Implementation, in the project execution itself. Change orders, omissions, coordination errors, and other big CA problems are all very expensive and very real. And chock full of frightening levels of legal liability. Everyone in the construction industry has heard of someone getting sued over problems like these. It's likely that we'll get sued over one of these at some point in our careers, it's almost impossible to avoid.

Wouldn't you think that having the opportunity to possibly reduce such problems should be taken advantage of as much as possible earlier in the process? Simply using BIM instead of a traditional process we feel helps reduce these problems; IPD and direct CNC fabrication workflows even moreso.

Sharing more information leads to better coordination and therefore less liability we feel. Actually, as an industry, I think that we should embrace a significantly more open workflow, and change how we all work together.
It's a big part of why I left Gensler, and started a design-build firm. I saw an opportunity to embrace this new way of working, and to see where it might go. CNC-enabled Design-Build negates those big worries, and lets us just get down to building great things.
Which is why we all became designers, engineers, or architects in the first place!

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.

These are molds for making leather formed bowls. We glued up 3/4inch Medex to make the big blocks, then milled it all down. They just look really cool just on their own.

So we get designers asking us sometimes about how we work with Revit and CNC tools together. Or they say that they tried doing it, and didn't have it really work out very efficiently. They wonder what special tool or bit of software we're using that makes it work.

Well, it's not about technology or tools. It's about people and process. We here at BWC have worked out a process that allows us to quickly and efficiently go from a BIM model in Revit to CNC-produced physical elements.

The thing that most designers don't understand about a CNC workflow is the CAM software, isolation of elements for export, and general fabrication and modeling methoids and limitations. It's all about the process in how you use these tools, and how you link them together, than in the tools themselves.

Having decent CAM software is a big part of this being sucessful. We use something called Aspire from Vectric, and we love it. It's great for three-axis work, which is what our CNC router is. We're not simply dumping out whole messes of models and feeding it to the CNC machine directly as if it was a 3D printer, we're exporting descrete elements from Revit, importing them into the CAM software, setting up the jobs within the CAM software, and then running those jobs on the CNC.

So we model things in Revit in a way where we can easily separate out all the bits. Good families, view templates, sections in families, lots of isolated 3D views, and more go a long ways to making this work. By exporting clean 2D sections of flat parts as DWG/DXFs, or 3D solids as DWG/DXF/SAT files, you can import those parts into CAM software for proper toolpathing.

We also at times use Revit families as a placeholder for a more complex model, or sometimes have a simpler representation in Revit of something we know we'll add more details to in the CAM software. For example, we might start with a solid in Revit, export that to Blender, manipulate it further, and then bring that into the CAM software. Or we might simply have two solids overlap in Revit, and within the CAM software we'll insert in the vectors requred for toolpathing the proper joint.

The final thing really is that we know how things go together. We know fabrication and construction, and a lot of Architects and designers simply don't really know how to build things. A huge part of making the CNC work is the actual craft of the thing, understanding tolerances and material strengths and weights and joinery details.

So it's really a whole process, not just a single tool or bit of software that makes it work. I'll be talking about this at the upcoming TAP pre-AIA conference, and I'm hoping to talk more about this at AU this year. With an actual demo of making something via a CNC or laser cutter on the spot if they will let me!

Also, if you are an Architect or Designer looking to go from Revit BIM models to CAM software and CNC production, well, give us a call. We love to help people out, and we're fast and reasonably priced, as well as being fun to work with! We've helped a number of designers as CNC consultants with modeling, toolpathing, and actual production and fabrication of their ideas, and we've got a proven track record of using BIM and CNC together.

HEY there you CNC freaks and general machine / robot lovers.

We are hosting SHOPBOT (the makers of our CNC machine) at the BWC headquarters here in Oakland for the Northern CA edition of CAMP SHOPBOT. The event is free, and this is a great time to ask all the questions you've ever had about CNC machines. There will be literature for you to take away, SHOPBOT reps to answers your questions and loads of CNC people like you! Meet them all. Come to CAMP SHOPBOT March 28th 9AM- 4PM BWC headquarters 1722 15th Street STC C Oakland, CA 94607 More info here.