Inspiration
Inspired by the way IKEA and Lego can turn amateurs into proficient builders by breaking down what seems to be a daunting project into easy and manageable steps--but for hardware.
What it does
Physical Studio is a guide hub for your projects that allows anyone, even those with no hardware experience, to make any hardware project they want by generating an interactive, step-by-step guide: like a Lego manual.
You can input your project idea or a link to a project you want to create, add parts from the part library or your bill of materials, and pictures of your desk and Physical Studio creates your guide, starting with an animation of your current step--whether thats component assembly, wiring, or CAD design--with easy to read instructions on how to complete that step, and a 3D render of your project after completing this step.
At each stage, you can send pictures of your work and it'll let you know if you're on track or what to fix. Every check gets saved as a commit so you can see the whole history of your build. You can also save and share your previous projects so you can always go back to them in the future.
Tech stack
Plan & Request: The user request calls Gemini API, which uses Google-GenAI requests the structured JSON with pydantic. This organizes Gemini's multimodal output (build plans, checks, photos) so the app can render and utilize it reliably. Bench photos are optimized (rotated, shrunk) using the Pillow library before Gemini's multimodal check to save quota.
Model generation: NumPy gets the measurements and uses trimesh (circuit-studio/geometry.py) to determine where components should be placed. Trimesh makes and edits the model for the bench, and saves it as a file that the browser can show. three.js renders the interactive 3D model of the bench in the webpage viewer.
Backend & Hosting: node.js, vite, vultr, docker, caddy, lets-encrypt, uFastMCP, model-context-protocol
Frontend: gemini, python, streamlit, google-genai, pydantic, pillow, numpy,trimesh, javascript, three.js, react, typescript, build123d
Demo Hardware: arduino, esp32, c++
What's next for Physical Studio Code
We will continue to improve Physical Studio guides to more complex hardware projects. Additionally, a future feature we want to include is to implement Google Vision and Gemini 3.8 Live to watch your bench through your camera and give live feedback and instructions.
