Design full engineering packages with CAD and calcs

The poster says their Dot runs design-calculate-verify loops for hours unattended, producing CAD, calculations, BOM, electrical docs, and drawings. · Oct 7, 2026

Done withDODots

What they did

The poster gives a Dot a large engineering task, answers a few clarifying questions, then leaves it running on its cloud computer for hours or days, sometimes by dropping a task document into Google Drive for it to work through sequentially. They say it had CAD tools, electronic schematic software, Blender, and scheduling ability, and it repeatedly inspected files, modified CAD or code, ran calculations and simulations, checked results, revised geometry, and produced BOMs, drawings, electrical docs, manifests, and verification data; the human restarted one overbuilt design with clearer constraints and reviews outputs before manufacturing.

How it went

They report one package with 1,000+ unique components, 6,000+ solids, nearly 300 pages of drawings, and hundreds of electrical connections, plus laser-cut parts that worked after a small speed tweak. It also reduced a 200k-triangle model to versions around 152k, 84k, 56k, and 50k, but the first structural pass used roughly a 5x safety margin and they would not ship safety-critical designs without human review.

Worth knowing

The main catch is time and economics: they say one complete manufacturing piece takes about 20 hours, and they doubt the current $100-subscription economics will last.

Source: Reddit · Oct 7, 2026