Watching a demo at a tech meetup in Denver made me rethink AI for my small shop.

Honestly, I saw a guy use a free AI tool to turn a rough sketch into a perfect CAD file in about 10 minutes. Ngl, I tried it on an old project back at my garage and it saved me a whole day of measuring and drafting. Has anyone else found a good AI tool for turning hand drawings into something you can actually machine?

2 comments

2 Comments

theabennett16d ago

My buddy who runs a custom bike shop showed me something similar last month. He used an app on his tablet to scan a napkin sketch and it spit out clean vector files for his plasma cutter. It completely changed how he does one-off parts now, he's not going back to manual tracing. What was the name of that free tool you tried?

tessa92216d agoMost Upvoted

Wait, your buddy's shop uses that too? That's wild. I totally get why he won't go back to manual tracing, it's such a time suck. The free one I messed with is called Inkscape, you just use the trace bitmap tool. It's not perfect but for a napkin sketch it's a game changer, @theabennett. Makes you wonder what other old school methods are about to get wiped out by a simple app.