57.9 to 44.5 mm, Four Decisions Closed, and What Still Looks Wrong

Last log the frame was gray boxes. Now it is built around my own prescription lenses, the front dropped 13.4 mm, every open decision is closed, and some things still look bad.

The win

The front frame went from 57.9 mm tall to 44.46 mm. Derived, not guessed: my traced lens height (37.46 mm, confirmed against a 37 mm caliper reading) plus a 4.6 mm top rim and 2.4 mm bottom. Normal acetate frames run 40 to 45 mm, so the front is finally eyewear and not goggles. Apertures follow my actual lens contour, and the holes punched through the face are gone, replaced by camera and IR windows inside the corner blocks.

Decisions closed

Seating real parts in the real frame surfaced four issues. All resolved:

Depth sensor aimed through my left lens. A prescription lens bends infrared, so readings would be garbage. Two placements now scored against real geometry, with a hard rule that it never fires through a lens.
A connector clearance conflict gets fixed in the frame, not the board, because the frame is parametric code and the board waits on a paid review. Do not spend review money on what a frame tweak solves.
A board height overrun goes to that review, with a new requirement: the reviewer returns a maximum component height so the pocket becomes a design rule, not a late surprise.
Rigid versus rigid-flex. The sensor strip could not route on two layers, and two independent attempts hit the same wall. Decision: 4-layer rigid now, rigid-flex for production. Rigid-flex costs several times more per run and first revisions always respin, so prove it cheap, then convert.

What still looks wrong

Not pretending the renders are pretty:

A void at the lower middle of the lens area, and the left aperture renders closed in some views, cut in others. Failed boolean, real breakage.
The bone conduction driver sticks out behind the ear as a ball on a stick. Deleted unconditionally. Fix: move the driver forward into the temple zone over the temporal bone just in front of the ear, where the arm is already full thickness, so it vanishes. Fallback is a small downward firing open ear speaker, visible only as tiny ports underneath, which is what Ray-Ban Meta and Monako do.
The nose bridge bulges forward as a tab. A real saddle scoops inward.
Lens rims are wavy and the two openings differ more than my lenses do.

Root cause: code CAD is excellent at holes, pockets, walls and clearances, and bad at smooth flowing eyewear surfaces.

Tooling change

I connected Fusion 360 to Claude Code over an MCP bridge. An add-in runs inside Fusion and the agent gets two tools: execute Python with full API access, and screenshot the viewport. That second one matters most, because the tool can finally see its own work and catch a blob before I do. Code stays master for engineering geometry and verification, Fusion becomes master for the exterior surface, and they meet through STEP.

Other finds

A possible Wi-Fi gap. The bench board got Wi-Fi free inside its compute module, but the in-frame board is a bare processor with no radio. Being audited, and if missing, the module goes into empty board area that already exists.
Display vendor replied. They will support a small prototype order, but pricing sits behind an NDA and onboarding, so that is the optics bottleneck. Meanwhile I am opening two more waveguide vendors so no single supplier can hold this hostage. One mass produces a waveguide targeting fifty dollars against the hundreds I budgeted.

Images

front-old-vs-new.png: the 57.9 mm slab beside the 44.5 mm frame
front_frame-front.png: the new front, following my real lens contour
assembly-hook-closeup.png: the lollipop, the defect being deleted
assembly-iso.png: current assembly

Next: fix the four defects, sculpt in Fusion, print the right temple and wear it.