Light Fixture
I was in the hackspace, and wanted to print a clamp for my LED light bar to mount it above my plotter. Up to this point it had been held up by double-sided tape that kept failing.
But I’d forgotten to take measurements of the light bar before leaving the house.
As an experiment, I decided to try using AI to generate the clamp for me. Luckily, I still had the original Amazon order email for the light bar from 5 years ago, so I fed the Amazon link to Gemini and asked it to generate a clamp.
The measurements were listed on the Amazon page so it didn’t have to do much digging! It came back with the measurements and generated a clamp design in OpenSCAD.
That looked suspicious to me. There wasn’t much margin for error if the AI messed up, and the proportions just felt wrong (turns out I was right — it was much too wide).
To de-risk it a bit, I asked Gemini to generate a clamp with a curved arch design that goes all the way around the light bar.
That looked better. The whole point was to not tinker too much and just see how well an LLM could do it, so I printed both designs and hoped for the best.
As expected, the first design was a failure and much too large. But the second one worked! It had slightly too much tolerance perhaps, but it was absolutely fine for my purpose and I was able to mount the light that same evening.
All in all, very impressed by how well the LLM did given minimal prompting. Though if I’d accepted the first design without question it would have been a waste of time, so it still requires a bit of judgement and oversight to use effectively.