Agreed. At the end of the day, manufactured parts are driven by constraints outside of the CAD environment so analyzing 3D data as the foundation of an AI system strikes me as attacking the problem from the wrong direction. i.e. Simple optimization of a part for injection molding can take it from requiring a bunch of side actions and collapsing cores to a simple 2 sided mold and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling. None of that is obvious from 3D data alone.
That said, I am excited for AI assisted CAD tools. Things like creating and applying global variables to an existing part, complex assembly analysis for part reduction or just making a starting base part can be incredibly tedious and are low hanging fruit for improving CAD workflows with AI imo.
It really depends on what your end goal & use case is. Resin printers are pretty phenomenal for any kind of product development and are very much a useful tool in the industrial design space.
That said, casual hobbyists should almost always start with an FDM (filament) printer as a first printer. Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience :/
They also use totally different mechanical concepts to move the pieces. The Phantom uses an etch-a-sketch style 2 access CNC machine with a magnet head embedded in the board (I think). For the Chessnut, each of the pieces are their own little micro robot that can drive around the board surface.
Really neat to see different mechanical solutions to the same automation problem!
that is so amazing! yeah my "solution"-- yeah, let's call it that: i spent 15mins thinking about it, so now i'm an expert!-- was a lot closer to the Phantom solution... driving the pieces around on the board autonomously seems absolutely insane, and i'm here for it.
Agreed, Rhino/Grasshopper is an amazing tool, especially once you start adding in C# components.
I’ve been using it off and on for several years on custom consumer product projects. It’s an under utilized workflow in many fields requiring 3D modeling imo.
I just finished a custom VR gasket generator for the Quest 3 that uses face scans from iPhone as the input and the project wouldn’t have been possible without Grasshopper:
https://youtu.be/kLMEWerJu0U
That's rad - thanks for sharing! I'll try to watch the whole thing when I'm not on deadline.
My jewelry work [0] is almost all in Grasshopper, as I've built up such a workflow there over the past... 8 years? that I don't need custom tools for most of it.
But my research work is all about building custom tools in C#. In fact I just finally published my component library yesterday [1]. Frankly I should have released it years ago, but I finally just bit the bullet.
Conceptually, the demo is showing a kind of omnidirectional conveyer. It’s a fun implementation of tech that has been used in shipping and fulfillment for a while.
Companies tend to shotgun out a bunch of patent soup unrelated to actual working prototypes during R&D. The media latches on to the most interesting sounding thing they can find relating to a demo so you end up with “ai controlled space lasers” describing something that’s actually much more mundane.
I think it's interesting to think about it as a hardware evolution question. If you look at a timeline of what it took to get to the modern smartphone, you could (arguably) say:
Each one of those evolutionary steps brought in a larger user base and grew the feature set of the prior generations hardware. The VR/AR/XR market comes with its own set of challenges so imagining where it maps onto that timeline is hard, but I would guess we are still more in the Handspring - WinCE era of these devices.
Wearable display systems have a solid and growing user base but the hardware is still a ways off from something that will have mass adoption. The roadblock is very much in the hardware, not the software IMO.
That said, I am excited for AI assisted CAD tools. Things like creating and applying global variables to an existing part, complex assembly analysis for part reduction or just making a starting base part can be incredibly tedious and are low hanging fruit for improving CAD workflows with AI imo.