Guillaume Dumoulin

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.