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Last weekend I bought my wife a bike off marketplace. It was in good condition but was missing one of the internal cable routing grommets. I gave Claude picture
by jhot 4mo ago
Last weekend I bought my wife a bike off marketplace. It was in good condition but was missing one of the internal cable routing grommets. I gave Claude pictures of the pill-shaped hole by itself and with my digital calipers in the long and short directions.
Gave it a short prompt and it gave me an openscad model with everything parametrized. I printed with no changes in tpu and it was nearly perfect on the first try. Claude put in a 0.3mm subtraction in the x/y dimensions and I lowered it to 0.1 and it's perfect.
Much easier shape than ancient Roman architecture but still very cool how easy it was.
- jetter 4mo agothese small functional prints are exactly where OpenSCAD and LLM generation shines
- simplyluke 4mo agoYeah, CAD has been my personal example of "oh the barrier to entry for this skill was high enough that I didn't do it and now I can be passably bad at it enough to get some simple things done" I've had similar experiences with making simple functional parts off a 3d printer with OpenSCAD + LLMs. I'm very aware that the models are worse at it than say, generating react code, and I'm also the antithesis of a skilled pilot. It's still cool and has resulted in me starting to learn a new skill at a hobby level.
- 0x696C6961 4mo agoLearning to make simple parts in onshape is pretty darn easy (and fun).
- jeffbee 4mo agoYeah. I teach this after school to 7th grade kids. Anyone can pick this up in a few hours.
- chalupa-supreme 4mo agoThey taught us to make Legobricks with CAD when I was in 6th. Wish I retained more of that and that it would be more widely taught.
- jeffbee 4mo agoI am reasonably confident that access to solid modeling and additive fabrication is now more widespread than ever.
- simplyluke 4mo agoI mean, like any other skill that has pretty much been my experience (though I tried fusion + openscad), but there is something about being able to ask a computer all the dumb noob questions that makes that first phase easier.
- dempedempe 4mo agoIt's like this with a lot of things now. For example, Nix's learning curve used to be a huge barrier to entry. Now with LLMs, I'm using nix-darwin and home-manager for dotfiles, package management, and have individual flakes in all of my projects for cryptographically reproducible builds!
- rlt 4mo agoNit: there’s nothing “cryptographic” about reproducible builds. “Reproducible build” already usually implies bit-by-bit reproducibility.
- bt1a 4mo agoi thought it mainly implied architectural/hardware compatibility and deterministic output
- aidenn0 4mo agoNix mostly does not guarantee deterministic output. It rather guarantees deterministic inputs, and then sandboxes the system to inhibit the build from accessing the outside world. Deterministic inputs do not always imply deterministic outputs.
- pabs3 4mo agoIndeed, the Reproducible Builds community is working on fixing non-deterministic build output https://reproducible-builds.org/ https://reproducible-builds.org/
- dempedempe 4mo agoI meant with Nix you're comparing hashes. With Docker, you're using pinned versions
- illiac786 4mo ago“The reproducibility is cryptographically verifiable with hashes“ would be the full sentence, but it’s a mouthful.
- k-Whale 4mo agosame — LLMs turn skills i'd parked for years into 'just try it' territory, which is genuinely new.
- amelius 4mo agoDoes it optimize for no support?
- 05 4mo agoYou optimize for no support when selecting print orientation (but for anything semi-cylindrical like described that would be the only sane orientation and the one slicer would choose when you smash the 'Auto Orientation' button).
- bee_rider 4mo agoNaive/uninformed question: does 3D printing produce any cleavage issues (like you’d get with a crystal) along the directions of printing, and does it ever make sense to change the orientation to help with that?
- 05 4mo agoOf course it does! Inter-layer adhesion is lower than the adhesion within the same layer, so it's often recommended to orient the print in a way that maximizes strength - especially for tensile loads. Sometimes it even makes sense to split the part so that you can print each of them optimally (flat side on the print bed) and get the best strength for the dominant load directions. That applies to functional prints - for decorative stuff you use the direction that gets you the cleanest print.
- jonah 4mo agoI was recently trying to get models to generate a 3D fortune cookie. Claude in three.js and Gemini in openSCAD. Neither really got the concept or could get very close at all. It's a surprisingly complex shape I guess.
- 8note 4mo agowith the shape you probably want something thats good at bends/fabric cause youd start with the flat shape, the set some contraints that certain edges are colinear
- car 4mo agoProbably easier with Trellis 2 or Meshy.ai
- idontwantthis 4mo agoAmazingly I tried the exact same thing! It also kept making meaningless corrections and was so confident that the blob it had produced was a fortune cookie that it started telling me I was wrong.
- skinner927 4mo agoClaude does well if you can provide all dimensions. It fails at guessing though. The real magic is when you can provide one dimension or photograph with a ruler in it and the AI will figure the rest out. Right now, Claude anyways, is pretty bad at guessing.