Design for 3D-Printing

This looks so good. I’ve gotten into 3D printing in the past six months with an A1 Mini. I initially bought it intending solely to do creative projects with my kid, but I’ve been surprised to find myself getting deeper into printing functional parts. I recently printed a 6” server rack for a GLi.net Beryl and Apple TV for travel, from a combination of pre-designed and self-designed parts.

3D printing as a pursuit can be time-consuming - there’s always a risk with these things that you take them on as a dilettante and they end up gathering dust in a corner. I initially scraped by with some middling Blender skills (leaning into non-destructive operations where possible), but that is far from ideal - you really do need CAD. But to anyone considering jumping in, I would say: if you get an A1 (get the full size, not the Mini) and use Claude to write your parametric OpenSCAD scripts, the time commitment is such that you can _just about_ indulge in this hobby as a dilettante - eg, as a project for your kids. Without LLMs, I think it would be too much of a commitment unless you’re really dedicated, or already have CAD skills.

Anyway, gonna go read this in full.

If you can assemble Legos you can design in Tinkercad. You don't need to mess around trying to get LLMs to write scad files, though the results can be hilarious.

Tinkercad seems pretty popular, I definitely looked at it along the way, but ultimately I’m never going to choose to use a product from Autodesk if there’s any reasonable alternative, and I’m usually not going to choose something that’s not open source - especially for a hobby. Different strokes though, might be a good fit for some people.