December 2017 | re:3D | Life-Sized Affordable 3D Printing

A Huge New Office for Huge 3D Printers

As you may be aware of by now, the re:3D Houston HQ moved last year, upgrading from a humble 2,700 square feet to a much-needed 7,000. We did a post on the new space’s specs when we were first moving in, but we thought you would appreciate a check-in now that we’re about half a year in to our new home.

If you haven’t already seen it, we did a short video on the new office and what it means to our team. Give it a watch for a visual tour of the space and some of our Houston team sharing their excitement about the newfound elbow room.

The extra 4,000+ square feet are an absolute joy to our Houston team. With the extra space has come new machinery (namely the beastly Hurco CNC seen over Steve’s shoulder in the machining room), large expanses of shelving perfect for storing more Gigabot prebuilds, and dedicated space for different departments so everyone has room to spread out.

But as much as our team can’t believe how we made it work for so long in our previous, sometimes-too-cozy office, we’re grateful for that space and the lessons it taught us.

As Matthew explained, a small space can do wonders for instilling efficiency in an organization. We became a well-oiled machine and a stronger team thanks to our time there, and those lessons will follow us to any future space we find ourselves in. Not to mention we are so appreciative of everything the new space affords us.

The extra shelving allows us get more prebuilds made and ready to go, which, Tammie explains, allows us to get Gigabots out the door faster. She reckons everything’s going out smoother because of that.

Our dedicated R&D space means engineering projects move quicker and new products can hit our store faster. (A couple exciting ones are just on the horizon – stay tuned.) The on-site machining room (and huge new CNC mill) factors into this as well. R&D projects can move forward faster when the necessary parts are milled in the room just next door, and turnaround time on new iterations can be measured in minutes instead of days or weeks.

And at the front of it all, a space to showcase what’s most important to us: the different ways in which others are using Gigabot.

The showroom, as we’re calling it, will be the home to a variety of projects enabled by Gigabot, generously provided to us by Gigabot owners from around the world. Our intent is to open the space to the public so people can see what large scale 3D printing allows different organizations to do, and also to educate. We are working on building a dedicated teaching & training space into one section of the showroom, specifically for the public and for customers.

We’re incredibly thankful to be where we are today, and we will always remember where we came from and will be forever grateful for the lessons we learned there. We hope to see some of you at the new space!

Morgan Hamel

Blog Post Author

Gigaprize 2017

The 2017 Gigaprize is open!

Read on to learn what the competition is all about and how you enter.

Our favorite part about the work we do at re:3D is the doors it opens for others. A 3D printer can help organizations design better products, cut costs, allowthem to manufacture their goods more efficiently, reduce their time to market. It can spell the difference, as a business, between being able to make a product and not.

As a 3D printer manufacturer, our goal is to make this technology available to as many people as possible so that its enabling potential can be used for good around the globe.

Part of the way we do this is by dedicating ourselves to our mission of creating large-scale 3D printers at an affordable price – we’re always looking for ways to up our quality while keeping costs low for our customers. The other way we do this is through the Gigaprize.

The Gigaprize is a giveaway competition we run: for every 100 Gigabots we sell, we give one away to an organization that will be using it for good.

This is our way of supporting others with social good missions who may not otherwise have the means to do what Gigabot will enable.

The competition is simple: make a video explaining how you or your organization would use Gigabot. What would the technology enable you to do? What would it mean for your company and its mission? What impact would it have on your community? Don’t worry about production quality – you can shoot the video on a cell phone – we’re interested in what you’re saying, not how you look while you’re doing it.

Submit the video through the Facebook contest submission page by December 25th and stay tuned for when we announce the winner, as chosen by a panel of judges, on New Year’s Eve.

Past winners of the Gigaprize include the Tunapanda Institute in Nairobi, Kenya and Good Works Studio in Houston, Texas. Tunapanda is a non-profit that runs a Nairobi-based school training young people in technology, design, and business skills, with a focus on applying disruptive technologies like 3D printing and wireless networking to solving local problems. Good Works Studio is a two-man design firm creating products to better the lives of families living in refugee camps.

Morgan Hamel

Blog Post Author

When 3D Printing and Nature Collide

The often strained relationship between humans and nature is no more evident anywhere else than in large cities. Trees and fields have been replaced with skyscrapers and roads, and often the little greenery that does exist is confined to highway medians or parks flanked by concrete jungles.

As the world population climbs steadily towards eight billion, our partnership with nature will become increasingly more strained – and more important. Strides have been made in recent years to better incorporate nature into urban life – the New York City High Line or vertical forest skyscrapers, for example.

This intermeshing of nature and technology/design is what excites Yarden Mor and inspired Symbio.

A graduate of a special joint program of computer science at the Hebrew University and industrial design at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, Symbio is her graduation project.

Her goal is to encourage symbiosis between humans and nature through technology. Symbio is a method to connect to existing natural foundations – like trees and rocks – and enable sustainable living preservation while maintaining the comfort we are accustomed to in modern life.

Yarden demonstrated the idea using a fallen portion of tree. Using 3D scanning to create a CAD model of the branch, she can create a design that fits perfectly to its shape. Parametric design simulates forces and optimizes the model’s weight and strength, and the complex digital outcome is birthed into the physical world thanks to 3D printing. Autodesk Tel-Aviv helped Yarden print her prototype on their Gigabot.

In the process of creating her prototype, Yarden researched technologies and materials, development of a system, and created prototypes of applications in urban design. This project is a proof of concept for larger-scale designs involving the same technology.

See more of Yarden’s work on her Instagram @yarden.mor.

Morgan Hamel

Blog Post Author