What do you create in your free time? With and without your kids?
Eddie, my six year-old, is in her dragon era, so she's constantly asking me to 3D print more dragon toys for her, and she makes whole scenes for them/us to play in with her dollhouse, using legos and everything else she finds.
Augie, my ten year-old, is always asking me to help him build some interesting gadget or vehicle he's dreamed up. He does pinewood derby for scouts and builds all kinds of things from wood and re-used electronics he has lying around. He also asks me to print other ideas he comes up with. Recently I helped him make a gag-pen that will squirt water instead of writing. For that we found a little hand-sanitizer pump mechanism and then used PartForge to build a fake pen and water reservoir around it.
For myself, for a long time I really enjoyed working completely away from the screen. I was doing woodworking, construction in the back yard and furniture building. Lately the screen has krept back into that workflow with 3d printing and robotics projects where I use agentic ai to help code and experiment with ideas.
What got you interested in making robotic arms?
Using at AI at work, I was beginning to see how useful and more capable it was getting for all kinds of knowledge and online work. I was curious to see how it applied to the physical world and robotics. When I looked I was super surprised by all the amazing open source projects going on in the robotics world. Makers at home were 3D printing and fabricating all kinds of fun interesting projects and sharing with others to do the same.
There were capstan drives, bipedal walking robots, little cute toy robots. All open source and shared. The ai embodiment isn't quite there for a useful robot butler, but it's getting close and I want to be making in the space when it does cross that threshold. I also want that era to driven by makers tinkering at home and not some giant corporation. Making and sharing things myself seems like the best way to help that happen.
Can you describe some of the frustrating experience of trying to learn/use CAD?
After college I worked as a freelancer doing CAD modeling for inventors who were trying to visualize their ideas. SolidWorks was my main tool during that time, but I've also used 3D Studio Max and more recently Blender to make models for different digital projects. Each of those tools is amazing and incredibly powerful in its own right. But each took months to learn enough to be productive in them, and now, after not using them I'm back at square one. I've lost all my muscle memory and have no idea how to use each UI when I pick it up. I realized what I needed to prototype were simple mechanical shapes and it just wasn't worth learning a whole CAD package for that when instead I could just type out a sentence explaining what I needed.
What was your "aha" moment for creating with PartForge?
I realized I had bought the wrong size bearings for part of a robotic arm I was building. I asked PartForge to change it and put in the bearing type. It looked up the measurements itself and updated the design. It even added a little control later to switch it back later no questions asked.
What are some of the cooler projects you've done on PartForge (or seen done)?
One of our team members is building an experimental desktop switch to work as part of a new keyboard idea he has. He showed me the model and said PartForge itself looked up and suggested specific electronic components for him, gave him urls for where to purchase them and added reference pieces so everything fit together nicely. That one looks really cool.
I'm also a nerd for the cool mechanical mechanisms you can build on a 3D printer. I love the gears and little moving mechanisms users are making. Another person on our team used PartForge to make a snapping wall-mounted broom holder than automatically opens when you pull the broom away from it and snaps closed around the handle when you push the broom on. That one looked really cool and I'm looking forward to printing one.
What are you excited about for the future of PartForge?
The AI models themselves are getting better and better every few weeks. We leverage that and let our users choose exactly what state of the art ai model they want PartForge to use.
Beyond that, our platform gives the AI agents the ability to build on all the published parts other users and agents have already built. I'm really excited how some of these parts can build on each other.
I recently created an articulated spider with 3D printed 'print in place' joints so you can pose the spider exactly how you want. The joint structure itself is now in the library for anybody building on PartForge and I'm eager to see what other creatures or posable models come out of that. I'm really excited where other makers take that and what that system compounds into.