The cheatsheet I made so my grandpa can use AI CAD

A 29-page printable booklet of the words CAD designers use, so the AI gets the model right on the first try. It's free, it lives at grandpacad.com/cheatsheet, and you can download the PDF or flip through it in the browser.

Why this exists

GrandpaCAD exists because my actual grandpa, Franc, wanted a phone holder for his workshop and got nothing useful out of the free AI tools he tried. He'd type "make me a holder for my phone" and end up with a box that didn't fit anything.

A CAD designer would have asked for it differently. Something like "cradle for a 75mm wide phone, 4mm wall, mounting holes on a 50 by 80mm base, 15 degree tilt." Same idea, totally different words. The model knows what the CAD words mean. It just needs you to say them.

The cheatsheet is the bridge. If you can talk like a CAD designer, the AI builds like one.

What's inside

Three chapters, 29 A5 pages:

• Shapes and operations. Primitives, transformations, booleans, edge and face features. The moves every CAD designer composes.
• Designing real parts. Holes, fits, fasteners, joints, motion hardware, hot ends, electronics, gridfinity, filaments. The hardware your design has to fit around.
• Prompting and printing. How to describe a part so the model builds what you want. Dimensions, references, multi-step builds, iteration. Plus slicer vocabulary for getting it onto a print bed.

Flip through it or download the PDF.

How I made it

Picking what goes in was the hardest part. I sat down with my own chat history and went through every prompt I'd ever sent the system. The good ones used specific words. The bad ones used vague ones. The cheatsheet is basically my running list of words that worked, with a picture next to each so you can see what each one means.

Every picture in the book is a tiny real 3D model. I made each one in OpenSCAD and rendered each from the same camera angle, so when you flip through the pages, the shapes feel like they belong to the same set instead of being clipart from twelve different stock libraries.

There are about 150 of these little models. I placed every one by hand. I checked each one against the part it's supposed to represent, but I'm not a CAD professional. I'm a programmer who has been making things for a year and a half because grandpa wanted a phone holder. If you spot something that's wrong, tell me and I'll fix it in the next print.

The print version

There are two PDFs. The one you download from the booklet itself has a faint "grandpacad" mark across each page, which is fine for reading on screen or printing yourself. There's also a clean print-shop version (same content, no mark) which is what I'll be sending to a real printer next month so I can hand a copy to grandpa.

If you want a physical copy, leave your email on the booklet page and I'll let you know when they ship.

Use it

It's free. Read it cover-to-cover the first time, then keep it within arm's reach and jump to the page you need.