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Comment by david_mchale | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Claude Opus 4.7 into OpenSCAD for creating hacked connectors for vibrating mesh nebulizers. It's incredibly powerful but still needs heavy manual checking to generate anything usable, but holy COW is it powerful when armed with the right info.

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The purpose of this repo (harness and skills) is really to just give the models more direct tools to generate and inspect STEP files. It basically generates a topology sidecar for every STEP file that can be used to quickly read the BREP (faces/edges/vertexes) without loading in the full STEP.

There's also a bunch of work going into the SKILL.md to plan for more complex parts (this is mostly a stop gap while the models don't have amazing spatial reasoning).

I appreciate that effort, seeing Claude start to prototype physical objects that can get mass-produced is unbelievable but wow it uses up tokens like crazy.

I'm using Opus 4.7 w/ the 1M context option on the vibrating mesh nebulizer repo and have hit compacting pretty often which is a restart-the-conversation flag for me on relatively small OpenSCAD files like the adapters and enclosures here which are like 10-40kb: https://github.com/dmchaledev/VibratingMeshNebulizerControll...

I've been playing around with this recently too and started getting much better results when I told it how to produce rendered PNGs of the file and to inspect it from several angles during iteration. I'm really only just getting going with it though, so if you have any tricks to share, I'd love to hear them!

genius, I have started doing this on web app test suites + playwright in other projects, makes a lot of sense to render shots from all the sides and ortho view and then feed that back to Opus 4.7 or similar as a smoke test.

I'm using it to rough out the skeletons for nebulizer power connector adapters so just throwing a lot of caliper measurements at it with detailed descriptions and reference photos of the connectors I'm duplicating has gotten me far.

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