OpenSCAD and Codex

I'm an aspiring woodworker, but I lack a proper bench in my garage. While what I have is a "bench" it is neither level nor stable, and was clearly designed by somebody winging it. However, as a novice, I have no idea how to build a bench! So, clearly, in the spirit of DIY and learning new things, I took it upon myself to work with my ChatGPT Plus subscription to figure out how to do some CAD modeling without needing to frontload an entire undergraduate's degree to learn how to do the drafting!

Some very neat things I have discovered in the process:

  1. Open AI's Codex App is very straightforwardly good for this kind of exploration
  2. Astra is very good at doing OpenSCAD model design for somewhat simple structures
  3. If you run into issues with WSL2 Interoperability between Windows and WSL2, you can just redownload OpenSCAD in WSL2

Now, this isn't just to play with OpenSCAD (although, it kind of was haha!) because doing any sort of wood working at a scale like this comes with quite a bit of money to spend on material. Even being thrifty, cutting down on the components of the bench, and designing around modularity, I'm still looking at ~$500 for the whole construction to be useful. While I'm not poor per se, I'm a skinflint and wasting any amount of that $500 budget is not acceptable. That's why this has been unbelievable; I can run some simple dimensions and pictures at Astra, describe what is there and what I need, work out some designs in OpenSCAD, and suddenly I have

  1. A budget
  2. A cut list
  3. An Exploded view with construction steps built into the assembly
  4. A session context I can retain for the future when I inevitably run into problems

I can accomplish in a single afternoon a far more complex and comprehensive planning session for my next few months of woodshop time and budget than I would ever have been able to have doing it by hand. Could I have drafted the design on paper? Yes. Could I have guessed at the material cost? Yes. Do I have the time to do all of this within a single afternoon? No. Frankly, I'm far more interested in cutting wood and learning the craft than I am in learning how to draft three dimensional models, even though both are skills worth learning! Someday I'll be able to come back to OpenSCAD and do my own drafting via code, but Chat GPT can't operate hand tools and I can't type as fast, so we may as well prioritize with one another!

As a matter of fact, I do. However, this is a custom job GPT did for me, and you could just do it yourself. However, in the interest of retaining potential monetization options I'm going to withhold some of these from open source for the time being. In the future I might just upload the OpenSCAD files to my source forge, but benches are special and well designed plans with a well-bundled instruction pamphlet might be worth good money, so I'm going to sit on the models for a while before open sourcing them. I gotta build the bench first, anyway! It cost me a few pennies for my 5hr session today to get a sophisticated model and project plan, so if you really need something I suggest spinning some drafts up yourself in the meantime.

← All notes