A complete product in under 4 hours, with my kids, AI and a 3D printer

In Brittany, palet breton is serious business. It's a traditional game: you throw heavy metal discs onto a wooden board and try to land closest to a smaller one, the jack. The catch? You play it outside, with 150-gram cast-iron discs. Not ideal when it rains. And in Brittany, it rains.

One afternoon, my kids and I asked ourselves a question: what if we made our own palets, to play indoors? We have a 3D printer, and I wanted to see how far AI could take us. So we set ourselves a challenge: build a complete product, from the idea to the online shop, in under 4 hours of work. Not a prototype: a real product, with a name, a brand, a video, a price and an online store.

Spoiler: Ti Palet exists (the site is in French).

TL;DR

• AI wrote the 3D model as code (Python and OpenSCAD): change a number or a logo, and you get a new file to print.
• The printer taught us a few lessons AI couldn't guess.
• Name, logo, promo video, music, pricing study: AI was involved everywhere, but the decisions stayed ours (often the kids').
• The online shop, with its configurator, payment and deployment, is built on my starter kit BlazorSaaSPro.

Step 1: a palet as code, not as a drawing

I'm not a 3D designer. Drawing a palet in CAD software, with rounded edges and a raised number, would have taken me the whole evening.

So I asked AI to do it differently: describe the palet as code. It wrote a small Python program (and its OpenSCAD version) that generates the 3D file from a few parameters:

python palet_breton.py 7                      # palet no. 7, engraved number
python palet_breton.py 7 --relief             # same one, raised number
python palet_breton.py "" --petit --logo triskel.svg --relief

We looked up the dimensions together: 56 mm wide and 8 mm thick for the palets, 45 mm for the jack (the petit), just like the ones you buy in shops. The kids picked the numbers, the colors and the logo for the jack: a triskel, of course. AI even wrote the script that draws the triskel.

That's when it clicked: a palet is no longer a file, it's a function. New number, new logo, and off you go.

Step 2: the printer has its say

First palet printed, first disappointment. The underside was slightly hollow (an "aesthetic" idea from the model): the printer had to print in mid-air, leaving dangling strands of filament. Fixed: flat underside.

Second surprise: in raised mode, the number started too low and went right through the bottom of the palet. Flip it over and you could see the digit backwards. Fixed too.

Then came the good surprise: two-color relief. You just swap the filament spool when the print reaches the height of the relief. The result: a grey palet with a white number, a red jack with a white triskel.

These are exactly the things AI couldn't guess on its own. It proposes, the printer disposes. But for every problem, describing it was enough to get the fix in the code.

Step 3: a name, a brand, a video

A product needs a name. After a few suggestions, we picked Ti Palet: ti means "home" in Breton. It's the house palet.

Then everything moved very fast:

• a logo: the red triskel and "Ti Palet";
• colors: midnight blue, yellow and red, taken from our printed palets;
• a 32-second promo video, animated in 3D straight from our palet files, with its synthesized, royalty-free music.

Step 4: pricing, without fooling ourselves

Could it sell, and at what price? I asked AI for a small market study: cast-iron palets, indoor silicone or leather sets, personalized palets...

Two findings:

• nobody personalizes every single palet (color, number, logo);
• a kit costs about €7 to make (plastic, electricity, packaging).

We set the price at €29 for the launch, for 12 palets and the jack. AI did the maths, but we made the call.

Step 5: a real online shop

This is the part I know best: the code. And it's where I saved the most time, because I didn't start from scratch. The site is built on BlazorSaaSPro, my .NET 10 and Blazor starter kit: accounts, Stripe payments, admin, multilingual support and SEO were already there.

What was left was what makes Ti Palet unique:

• a configurator: pick the color, the numbers palet by palet, the jack's logo, raised or engraved, with a live preview;
• order payment with Stripe;
• automatic deployment: one push to GitHub, and the site is live on my hosting.

The outcome

Under 4 hours of work (not counting the printing hours, when the printer works on its own), and we had:

• a configurable 3D model;
• real palets on the table;
• a brand, a video and music;
• a well-thought-out price;
• an online shop: tipalet.fr.

What I take away from it:

• AI doesn't replace the workshop. The printer taught us things no model could guess. But the "describe the problem, get the fix" loop is remarkably effective.
• Decisions stay human. The name, the colors, the triskel, the price: AI suggests, we choose, and the kids had their say at every step.
• Starting from a solid base changes everything. Without my starter kit, the site alone would have taken me days.
• It's a great family project. The kids watched an idea become an object, then a product.

And now, when it rains, we play palet in the living room.

Have you tried this kind of experiment with AI? Tell me in the comments!