This page is a deep dive into whomlab — the wondrous manufactorium that we use to create roons.
If you’re looking instead for details of how we physically manufacture the prototype roons, click here.
the lab
The location of whomlab is a closely guarded secret. Medieval alchemists, by carefully examining the entrails of the philosopher’s stone, have narrowed it down to a garage in Camden Town, London.
Every few years, the proprietor of whomlab releases 5 golden tickets, which
gridfinity
We organise our workshop using gridfinity.
Gridfinity is a modular grid system. You cover your worktops with a bunch of 3D printed grid. There are loads of freely available 3D prints with a compatible base — you just print and slot them into the grid. It keeps everything neat and it’s super easy to rearrange.
It’s so useful that we are tentatively considering making roons compatible with it. By increasing the disk drive size from 80mm to 84mm, each drive would fit into a 2×2 gridfinity cell (assuming proper mounting). But is it worth losing the nice round numbers? Contact us if you have thoughts on this one way or another.
the wall of roons
Making the review kits takes a lot of manual work and organisation. So we set up a tiny production line to check our current stocks of each roon:
Here’s a neat thing: you can fit a little magnetic pad on the underside of gridfinity boxes. They still fit into the grid, so you can easily move them back and forth between the two modes.
wall magnets
For decoration, we put little sheets of rubber steel on the walls. You can buy sticky magnetic dots for very cheap, and put these on lightweight household items, for a flexible wall decoration system.
unpaid interns
Pretty much all the components are prototyped in PLA using the Bambu A1 Mini. I cannot stress enough how good these things are. My setup has three of them in parallel:
- The workhorse, monkey, that churns out large simple parts
- The specialist, axolotl, that uses the AMS Lite (which enables multicolour prints) to do detailing and more complex parts
- The mercenary, PrintyBeetle (on loan), that picks up the slack
Why are these so good?
- Super affordable
- Really fast (like 6x faster than my previous printer)
- We’ve thrown huge amounts of work at them and they’ve never broken
- We never have to level the beds or do maintenance, just click “print”
- WiFi enabled so I can print to my garage from my office
We are not sponsored by Bambu, but if anyone at Bambu is reading this, your printers are really really good; please send me free stuff. Also HOKA running shoes. These are the two products whomtech is prepared to sell out for.
more info
If you’d like us to add more info on any particular area, get in touch at support@whomtech.tech.