Moving Day (belated)
As you may know, we moved into our new office on Friday. Watch Pete demonstrate expert packing technique during our big move into the new office. We're still getting things sorted out, but we're super excited about the new space. Mostly we've been playing with our new Amazon Echo Dot. Unfortunately, Alexa still doesn't understand: "give Jon a wedgie."
We bought a building
Exciting news today- Swarm bought a building! We've labored long hours over the last few months to prepare our new home, and last Friday we moved in. We're really excited about our new permanent home, with tons of space to grow, an enormous shop (with room to add many exotic CNC machines and robot arms), and most of all the fact that we're across the street from Red Iguana 2. Stop by and check out our new digs.
Nailed it.
3D printing is amazing (except for when it's not)
3D printing is an amazing technology. No doubt about that. And in the past 5 years so many very smart people have worked tirelessly to make it easy to do and incredibly affordable. It is so empowering to be able to prototype whatever you want, whenever you want.
But 3D printing often comes with many headaches. Prototypes can have trouble sticking to the build platform, the printer can lose its registration, or a host of other problems. Most of them result in what we (un)affectionally call "spaghetti". Here at Swarm, we were building a large AT-AT head (strictly business purposes of course) a few days ago on our printer and managed to catch one of these frustrating spaghetti manufacturing instances on our time-lapse camera. (video below)
Next week's blog post, we're going to show you some of the 3D printing tips and tricks that we use to fix some of these prints without re-printing the WHOLE build. We'll also show you the strictly business reason that we're printing a large AT-AT head.
Thinking outside the box.
Brilliant design thinking... To reduce shipping damages, a Dutch bike company printed a television on their boxes. via theverge
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How I built this.
Great new podcast of product launch stories.
How to hacking the mainframe...
... at least look like you are hacking it. Use this little app for the next time you are Jack Bowering WWIII.
Goofy Little bike video
Little video of our Monday MTB ride.
SkiQuicky Delivery
For just over a year, Swarm has been designing, prototyping, revising, building, programming, sweating, engineering, assembling, crying over, disassembling, reassembling (you get the picture) the world's first fully automated ski waxing machine. The idea came from an entrepreneur up in Idaho and in July we finally had the first production prototype ready for delivery. The machine was lovingly wrapped:
Then we put it up on the trailer and delivered to the client.
Finally, we celebrated. Now onto the final production version. Keep an eye out for SkiQuicky Machines at a resort near you starting this winter. Cheers!
