TDR

Ask your AI assistant about your bowl.

Free add-on for Segmented Bowl Designer. Point your AI assistant at a design file and ask it questions in plain words — no menus, no exporting.

Download free — 42 KB No licence needed. Works with the free and paid versions.

What you can ask it

  • “What’s my cut list?” — every ring: segments, diameters, board width, miter angle, blank length, and how much strip to buy
  • “Check this before I cut.” — catches the mistakes that split wood on the lathe: a base rabbet cutting through ring 1, a lid with no wood above the tongue, a solid base wide enough to move
  • “What will this cost me in walnut and maple?” — material and labour, priced from your own board-foot numbers
  • “Which wood goes where on ring 4?” — position-by-position glue-up chart, including the brick stagger
  • “Send the segments to Blender.” — one named solid per segment, or STL for a slicer

Same arithmetic as the app. It can’t tell you a different miter angle than the app does — it’s the same code underneath.

Change the bowl while you watch

Version 0.3.0 adds an AI button to the toolbar. Switch it on and your assistant can change the design in the open window — “make ring 6 walnut” — and the bowl redraws in front of you.

It can’t save over your files. Changes show up as unsaved, exactly like you’d made them by hand, and saving stays your decision. The button is off every time the app starts.

What you need

Straight answer: this takes about ten minutes and a bit of typing.

  • Node.js — a free download from nodejs.org, one installer
  • An AI assistant that supports MCP — Claude Code or Claude Desktop
  • One line pasted into a settings file — we give you the exact line

If none of that sounds familiar, this add-on isn’t for you yet, and the app works exactly as well without it.

Setting it up

  1. Unzip it somewhere you’ll keep it
  2. Open a terminal in that folder and run npm install
  3. Paste the one line into your assistant’s settings
  4. Restart your assistant and ask it to check a design

Full instructions are in the README inside the download.

Honest notes

Where it looks for designs. Your Documents folder, and nowhere else, unless you point it somewhere. It can’t wander into the rest of your machine.

What gets sent where. The add-on runs on your computer. But your assistant is the thing answering, so whatever you ask about your design goes to it — the same as anything else you type there.

No account, no key, no telemetry. It doesn’t phone home and it doesn’t check a licence.

Segmented Bowl Designer · The Drawing Store · Questions? drawingroom@rogers.com

Download free — 42 KB Works with Segmented Bowl Designer 0.3.0 and up.