I recently got a 3d printer. It is fascinating that you can just imagine things and turn them into real physical objects. I always imagined this and some recent cleanup in my big city, small flat, brought up the idea again for getting a new tool.
The air they produce is rather toxic so I looked into model with some air filtration system. I got a 5M Pro model used for around 250€. In addition to the printer you need various filaments. For ecological reasons I pick mostly PLA, which can be grown from plants.
Which tool to use in the age of AI?
I looked into zoo.dev. I once was convinced that this is the future of manufacturing wiht AI. They are still rather early in their product and ran into performance issues. The problem with their approach as a user is that it runs on their servers and the programming langauge is closed source. So even though I have a powerful computer I am limited by the performance of their servers. Their AI has a lot of potential but at the moment it is very slow and it needs hours till you turn a prompt into an object.
I also tried using OpenSCAD. Claude is familiar with it but it could not resolve some issues I had with the model. Another upside is that it is faster and runs locally.
I also tried using a python script to modify the export that I gout out of zoo design studio. In the end I let Claude write a python script that writes the coordinates in an .obj directly.