Whittle
Describe a part in plain words and get a verified, printable file. Runs fully local and offline. In development. Python, Proprietary. Runs on Linux.
What it does
Whittle is a fully local, fully offline workshop for designing 3D-printable parts. There are two ways in, and both end at the same printability check.
Describe a part. Write what you need in plain words, optionally with a reference photo. Whittle returns a verified, printable STL/STEP bundle and a report.
Or bring one in. Load an STL, OBJ, PLY or glTF file. Whittle reads it, repairs it, measures it and puts it behind a stack of adjustable operations (hollow, cut to fit the bed, thicken thin walls), each one a slider rather than a baked result. It makes somebody else's mesh editable.
Nothing is called printable until the geometry has passed the printability gate.
The one architectural decision
The model does not write CAD code. It fills in a validated spec, and deterministic Python turns that spec into geometry. When the model gets something wrong, the schema rejects it before any geometry exists.
Local by design
- Description to part runs on a local model through Ollama, on your own hardware. Every model backend checks that its host is on the local machine and refuses otherwise.
- Photo to mesh is opt-in and off by default, so Whittle installs and runs with no GPU libraries, no model weights and no network.
- The spec file is the durable result. Everything after the spec is deterministic, so building, verifying, rendering and measuring all work with no model loaded.
Share specs, not meshes
A downloaded STL is frozen. A Whittle spec is about a kilobyte of readable text that rebuilds the part exactly, at any size, in any material, for any nozzle.
Three ways to use it
- A desktop app:
whittle-gui - A command line:
whittle build parts/vent/spec.yaml - A Python API:
from whittle import api
Status
In development. Requires Python 3.11 or newer. The library is not yet published to PyPI, so it installs from source.