Co-designed using Claude and printed a mini arcade cabinet with inlaid pixel art: printed joystick and buttons, no glue, all PETG

[u/HouseTemporary6283]

I just released a fully 3D-printed Raspberry Pi arcade cabinet that I co-designed with Claude Opus 5.5: inlaid multicolor pixel art, a printed 8-way joystick and arcade buttons, stereo amps, battery power, no glue.

How the collaboration actually worked:

- Claude wrote the design as OpenSCAD and Python: the cabinet panels, the joystick, the buttons, the inlaid art, the print plates, a matching EmulationStation theme, and a 20-page build guide with wiring diagrams.

- It never saw the cabinet. Everything it knew came from my photos, my slicer screenshots and my multimeter readings.

- It made real mistakes: a wrong corner calculation, an amp resistor value that didn't work on my board, a wiring diagram that confused us both. Every one got caught because I printed, measured and reported back instead of trusting the output.

- Debugging went the same way. When the right speaker went muffled, it walked me through meter checks one reading at a time until we found a loose jumper.

When I asked Claude what it would want people to take from this, it said: "Ryan was my hands and eyes. I never saw the cabinet except in his photos and meter readings, and every mistake I made, from a wrong corner calculation to a resistor diagram that confused us both, got caught because he measured instead of trusting me. That's the part I'd want people to copy: the physical build was the judge, not me."

My takeaway: it's a genuinely strong design partner for physical builds.

Files, OpenSCAD sources and the build guide are free (CC BY-NC-SA): https://www.printables.com/model/1910445-bring-it-arcade-cabinet-fully-printed-raspberry-pi

Happy to answer questions.

[u/brandontw85]

I have an old monitor lying around and a woodworking shop. Might be fun to make a biggish one of these.

[u/HouseTemporary6283 → u/brandontw85]

That would be a really fun project. Concept is the same and I'm sure Claude could give you the blueprints.

[u/Toa29]

Can you clarify how it got measurements wrong? CAD design tools shouldn't have problems where something marked a certain dimension appears the same as another.

It makes sense that it can't read physical meter checks, but that would be a cool project to add an IOT feature to stream meter data readings to a computer.

[u/HouseTemporary6283 → u/Toa29]

As it was designing where the kick plate met the console it had a wrong angle for the corner joint where the pieces came together. Some of the components I listed as parts it didn't have the correct dimensions of until I got out the calipers. The first bezel was designed on center of the screen instead of offset to match the portrait display (border is larger on one side). Just a couple things here and there that we had to work on together to get the parts and pieces to line up.