AI and 3D printer iterate on kids' screenless device enclosure

Dan Peguine@danpeguine

here is how I iterate rapidly on physical products with AI and a 3D printer

I am building Button Box and am now iterating on the enclosure.

for context, I have zero experience with industrial design or building physical products

I use:

- 3D printer: Bambu Lab X1 Carbon, PLA

- Opus 5.5 medium is my orchestrator for the whole business, it has all my context and we iterate on the box together

- it hands off the actual CAD design to Astra

- coded sol actually works with bambu studio to send to print

two core things I do to iterate fast:

1. I don't print the entire enclosure as I iterate. I print specific parts, which we call coupons.

every part that goes into the box, I measure with calipers, so opus knows the exact dimensions and can help me position it.

for example, I want my PCB held inside the box, so I print a coupon just for that.

it's a small part, so it saves a ton of time. Claude comes up with the experiments, so I might print 3 coupons of the same part and test them. same for screw posts and holding an NFC reader.

2. I also iterate on creative decisions like the speaker’s grille.

Claude has all the context about the business and the product philosophy, so it can come up with many variations.

I also asked it to check kids' products like Yoto and Toniebox to see how they do grilles.

we learned they mostly do little dots.

Toniebox has dots in a cat design, so I wanted to see if we could do different ones.

I asked for 4 variations and printed small versions of them as coupons, so I could quickly see which one I like.

Btw the limiting factor here is how fast the printer prints (which makes me want to get a few more).

This is obviously compounding. I can go through many different iterations. I can change the BOM and quickly redesign the enclosure around it.