Image: reddit.com · Saw Adam.new and got curious if plain Claude could do real hardware. A week later I have an open source Pocket recorder designed down to CNC drawings
An open-source take on the Pocket recorder, designed by a Claude agent
Given its own tools, a Claude agent set up a CAD toolchain and designed an ESP32 voice recorder with an aluminium case down to CNC drawings.
The full story
Curious whether a plain Claude agent could do real hardware design, the maker set it to make an open-source DIY version of the Pocket phone-back recorder: ESP32, two mics, battery and an aluminium case. Claude set up its own toolchain with CadQuery, OpenSCAD and matplotlib and downloaded real STEP models of the boards.
It found a reverse-engineered Pocket protocol and suggested making the firmware compatible so the existing desktop app would work. It wrote the enclosure as one parametric script with an interference check on every build, slimming it from 15 mm to an 80x48x12.6 mm aluminium shell. After a week the design reached CNC drawings; the post does not say it has been built.
How it was done
Tools
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: Saw Adam.new and got curious if plain Claude could do real hardware. A week later I have an open sou
The maker's post on r/esp32.
The subreddit's moderators removed it, but the original is still readable (it can take a few seconds to load): archived copy of Reddit: Saw Adam.new and got curious if plain Claude could do real hardware. A week later I have an open sou (opens in a new tab)
- The project: adam.new
Linked in the post.