I've been using Claude Opus 4.7 into OpenSCAD for creating hacked connectors for vibrating mesh nebulizers. It's incredibly powerful but still needs heavy manual checking to generate anything usable, but holy COW is it powerful when armed with the right info.
Text-to-CAD
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Re: Text-to-CAD
#22I've been using Claude Opus 4.7 into OpenSCAD for creating hacked connectors for vibrating mesh nebulizers. It's incredibly powerful but still needs heavy manual checking to generate anything usable, but holy COW is it powerful when armed with the right info.
The purpose of this repo (harness and skills) is really to just give the models more direct tools to generate and inspect STEP files. It basically generates a topology sidecar for every STEP file that can be used to quickly read the BREP (faces/edges/vertexes) without loading in the full STEP.
There's also a bunch of work going into the SKILL.md to plan for more complex parts (this is mostly a stop gap while the models don't have amazing spatial reasoning).
Re: Text-to-CAD
#23I have been using Claude to generate OpenSCAD for 3D printing. It works decently when the jobs are simple and can be easily described, but the description part really makes it clear how little vocabulary the ordinary person has to compose a good picture of any real item that isn't just a basic shape. It seems that the trick, like most things with getting LLMs to do something complicated and have it work well, is to b…
The trick might be to put a multimodal A.I. to describe what it sees in an image, and employ another LLM to put the textual representation into code. Multimodal A.I.s are good at describing images.
Even a handwritten sketch could be a very good starting point for an image recognition from an A.I.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#24i might borrow the skills etc for good ideas sometime. thats a lot of integration surface
Re: Text-to-CAD
#25Without benchmarks and/or a whole suite of non-cherrypicked examples, this means nothing because you can trivially make an AI generate anything from text.
Working on benchmarks at the moment! Always open to feedback / PRs.
im def working on benchmarks for how my own general harness improves task performance vs same model in a commodity setup. its hard to do!
i will say that my current harness: https://github.com/cartazio/oh-punkin-pi is a testbed for a bunch of 2nd gen harness tech, largely optimized for reasoning llms only. the next one after this harness is gonna be epicccc
Re: Text-to-CAD
#26I've been using Claude Opus 4.7 into OpenSCAD for creating hacked connectors for vibrating mesh nebulizers. It's incredibly powerful but still needs heavy manual checking to generate anything usable, but holy COW is it powerful when armed with the right info.
The purpose of this repo (harness and skills) is really to just give the models more direct tools to generate and inspect STEP files. It basically generates a topology sidecar for every STEP file that can be used to quickly read the BREP (faces/edges/vertexes) without loading in the full STEP. There's also a bunch of work going into the SKILL.md to plan for more complex parts (this is mostly a stop gap while the mode…
I appreciate that effort, seeing Claude start to prototype physical objects that can get mass-produced is unbelievable but wow it uses up tokens like crazy.
I'm using Opus 4.7 w/ the 1M context option on the vibrating mesh nebulizer repo and have hit compacting pretty often which is a restart-the-conversation flag for me on relatively small OpenSCAD files like the adapters and enclosures here which are like 10-40kb: https://github.com/dmchaledev/VibratingMeshNebulizerControll...
Re: Text-to-CAD
#27I just posted this somewhere else -- but overall big fan of these text to cad rigs as projects. Obligatory mention of https://zoo.dev/ who went to extreme lengths on this. I will say I explored this reasonably deeply and came away with the conclusion that even though we have OpenSCAD and all these examples, LLMs are still very weak at spatial reasoning compared to diffusion models. You can do all sorts of tricks like…
I've been watching the space as well, waiting for the day I can stop fiddling with widgets and just tell the damn thing about the shapes I want and the ways in which they will move. Alas, we're far from that yet.
> That's getting solved already in china leading labs
Care to drop a bit of info as a follow up to this claim? Curious!
Re: Text-to-CAD
#28Not sure I understand ... no mention of an actual CAD engine backend ... did I miss it? Or is this capable of generating STEP files directly from an LLM (which I doubt)? [EDIT]: haha. the answer is hidden in: .agents/skills/cad/requirements.txt TL;DR: build123d ezdxf numpy trimesh vtk and the engine is build123d, which, from its home page: Build123d is a Python-based, parametric (BREP) modeling framework for 2D and 3…
I don’t think its time has come. I think there are a lot of software folks that don’t understand what the actual pain points of professional engineers and CAD technicians are. I think there is a niche where text-to-CAD is good: hobby users who don’t want invest in learning a CAD software UI. For professionals, where results have dollar values, there needs to be a much deeper understanding of the problem domain to understand why enterprise CAD software sucks.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#29Hi all, repo author here, appreciate the kind words and feedback!
I'm brushing up on robotics after spending the last 10 years working in software land. After being humbled by modern CAD tools like Onshape, I built this harness / skill to help me generate some basic CAD models for a 7dof robot arm I'm designing.
It ended up working much better than I expected, particularly on the latest GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 models. It's been a lot of fun to work on. I've learned a lot about how STEP files work (opencascade, breps, etc) as well as 3d rendering tools like threejs.
I don't have much intention of turning this into a business, it's really just a fun open source tool that I'll continue to maintain as long as myself and others find it useful. Very open to ideas and contributions.
P.S. I just pushed a major update that improves the workflow and scripts/tools for the CAD skill. I also added some basic benchmarks to start measuring performance over time.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#30Hi all, repo author here, appreciate the kind words and feedback! I'm brushing up on robotics after spending the last 10 years working in software land. After being humbled by modern CAD tools like Onshape, I built this harness / skill to help me generate some basic CAD models for a 7dof robot arm I'm designing. It ended up working much better than I expected, particularly on the latest GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 models. I…
More details on the robot here: https://x.com/soft_servo/status/2047436911657025858