[jhot]

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.

[simplyluke]

Yeah, 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.

[dempedempe]

It'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]

Nit: there’s nothing “cryptographic” about reproducible builds.

“Reproducible build” already usually implies bit-by-bit reproducibility.

[illiac786]

“The reproducibility is cryptographically verifiable with hashes“ would be the full sentence, but it’s a mouthful.

[pabs3]

Build reproducibility checks usually use bitwise comparison, not hash comparison.

The Reproducible Builds project also wrote diffoscope, which goes quite far with helping identify where differences occur and how to fix them.

https://reproducible-builds.org/ https://diffoscope.org/ https://try.diffoscope.org/

[illiac786]

Let’s say, for the positive case, hash comparison is significantly faster.

[dekhn]

yes, but it's still not cryptological, it's just verification using hashes.

[fc417fc802]

The hash being cryptographically secure is significant. In contrast, you could use (for example) md5 to non-cryptographically verify that the full process matched.

[dempedempe]

I meant with Nix you're comparing hashes. With Docker, you're using pinned versions

[bt1a]

i thought it mainly implied architectural/hardware compatibility and deterministic output

[aidenn0]

Nix 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]

Indeed, the Reproducible Builds community is working on fixing non-deterministic build output https://reproducible-builds.org/

[pimeys]

Nix is also great at work. You keep the server nix code in the same repo and OpenCode can just change and test server config.

[0x696C6961]

Learning to make simple parts in onshape is pretty darn easy (and fun).

[jeffbee]

Yeah. I teach this after school to 7th grade kids. Anyone can pick this up in a few hours.

[chalupa-supreme]

They 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]

I am reasonably confident that access to solid modeling and additive fabrication is now more widespread than ever.

[simplyluke]

I 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.

[k-Whale]

same — LLMs turn skills i'd parked for years into 'just try it' territory, which is genuinely new.

[skinner927]

Claude 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.

[jonah]

I 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.

[idontwantthis]

Amazingly 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.

[car]

Probably easier with Trellis 2 or Meshy.ai

[8note]

with 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

[jetter]

these small functional prints are exactly where OpenSCAD and LLM generation shines

[amelius]

Does it optimize for no support?

[05]

You 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]

Naive/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]

Of 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.