A pet project that waited 15 years for the tooling

Yurii Efremov — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:33:23 +0000

I'm a web dev engineer by trade. But about 15 years ago, I sketched out a side project I couldn't build.

The idea needed custom, one-off physical objects with fine geometric detail. In ~2010, the only path was to have a CNC machine carve solid wood. €10k+ in equipment, an actual workshop, noise levels incompatible with anywhere I've ever lived. So the idea went into the same folder where most engineers keep things "waiting on tooling."

What's funny is that it stayed there for a decade and a half, and then in the last 2-3 years, basically every blocker dissolved at once: affordable resin printers, flexible photopolymers, generative AI for design generation. The Anycubic Photon in 2017 was arguably the moment hobbyist resin printing became affordable, and the original idea did resurface in my head then - but I never actually got around to the project. Life, work, other priorities. It took a few more years, and the arrival of generative AI, for the full stack to feel buildable in a reasonable amount of time.

So I picked the folder back up. I'm going to share the build log here - partly because I think other engineers will recognise the pattern (an idea waiting on its tooling), partly because I want feedback on the technical choices along the way.

Does anyone else have a project file like this? Something that's been waiting years for the right tools at the right price?

DEV Community: Yurii Efremov

A pet project that waited 15 years for the tooling