Meet the Lab
This is not a website selling someone else's stuff. Here is exactly how an idea becomes a toy: the real machines, the real crew, human and AI, and the rules everyone follows.
also 3D-printable, free: print your own →
How the Lab works
Norman, a used Dell PowerEdge server, and the family's AI computers live in our house, and every toy goes through the whole Lab pipeline, from idea to toy box.
tap the numbers to see how an idea becomes a toy →
A frog with wings? A dragon in a cowboy hat? Every toy starts as an idea, mine or yours.
Norman is a used Dell PowerEdge server Dad and I racked up at home. The family's AI computers next to him (a DGX Spark) run the Imaginator. They run the Lab around the clock. Guard guinea pig included.
The Lab’s AI turns the idea into a 3D design in about a minute. Designing is free; printing is the paid step, and a grown-up approves the exact revision before anything prints. Bendy toys are preview-only for now.
Try the Imaginator →Big Tex and the rest of the print farm grow it layer by layer while I keep them fed with fresh plastic.
I bend, bounce and pocket-test every toy myself before it goes on the table. Strict standards.
Sold at my stall, packed by the family, and launched off to be played with. That is the whole point.
Find my stall →Norman and the AI computers do the thinking. The print farm does the building; here are the ones with names.
Big Tex Bambu Lab H2S
The flagship. Big prints, silk colors, and the dragon department.
Lil' Tex Bambu Lab A1 mini
The scout. Rides to every market and prints minis live at the stall.
Sir Prints-A-Lot Bambu Lab P2S
The workhorse. Minis and keychains all day, never complains.
Colorzilla Bambu Lab H2C
The new beast. Two nozzles, four colors on top, zero patience.
The technical bit, for grown-ups
Parents and fellow nerds ask how much of this is real. All of it. Cloud services handle the shop, email and payments; the toy models are made on our own machines. Tap the numbered badges on Dad’s blueprint for the full story.
A rack-mounted homelab Joseph helped assemble and cable: Norman, a used Dell PowerEdge server, next to the family’s AI computers, four NVIDIA DGX Spark™ nodes (GB10 Grace Blackwell, 128 GB unified memory each), managed switching, UPS-backed power, and a live temps dashboard. Runs 24/7. The guard guinea pig on the rail is load-bearing morale equipment.
The AI computers run NVIDIA’s open Nemotron™ models from Hugging Face: Super for chat and reasoning, Nano for quick checks, vision, and Parakeet for speech. With NVIDIA NeMo, fine-tuning happens at home on the Lab’s own designs. Cloud services handle the shop, email and payments; the toy models are made on our own machines.
The Imaginator chains SDXL-Turbo (Stability AI) to draw your idea, then Hunyuan3D-2 (Tencent) sculpts it into a 3D design, in about a minute, and once a grown-up approves the exact revision, Big Tex & friends print it in plastic.
This site is a static front end with serverless functions for the Imaginator and Reachy, the Lab’s chat robot. Checkout is Shopify. A parent reviews every real quote and order, and supervises everything the Lab ships.
Who actually runs this place
How does an 8-year-old run a real toy company? With a crew. Dad builds custom harnesses (rulebooks and guardrails) and AI agents grind through the boring back-office jobs, while the humans make every call that matters and a parent signs off on anything real. Tap the yellow badges to meet everyone:
Chief Toy Inventor. Picks every toy, play-tests every print, runs the market stall, and has final say on all things fun. The whole point of the company.
| CODENAME | THE INVENTOR |
| HEIGHT | taller every week, impossible to track |
| VEHICLE | a very fast bicycle |
| WEAKNESS | chocolate chip cookies |
| STATUS | ALWAYS PRINTING |
A decade in aerospace factories, then founded and exited AMT PostPro: 900+ machines in 40+ countries, 50+ patents. Now builds human-supervised AI agents at his lab, Thinking Humans. This toy company is their toughest boss.
Dad on LinkedIn →Norman is a used Dell PowerEdge server. Next to him, the family’s AI computers (four NVIDIA DGX Spark nodes) draw every Imaginator toy and power Reachy’s chat. All of it runs at home, around the clock.
Security & morale. Sits on Norman’s rack rail; load-bearing. Accepts snacks, tolerates meetings, and has never once needed debugging. The only staff member who cannot be automated.
A real Reachy Mini robot. Answers the chat bubble on this site, wobbles his head at markets, and takes toy requests straight from kids at the stall. Reports directly to Joseph.
The Lab’s fast-talking research sidekick, built on xAI’s Grok. Digs up answers at silly speed, watches what kids are loving, and argues with Norman about correct dragon anatomy. Norman usually wins.
AI agents (Anthropic’s Claude) working inside Dad’s custom harnesses. They keep the website fresh, draft the paperwork, watch the store and prep the social posts. Then a parent reviews every real order, email and dollar.
Big Tex, Lil’ Tex, Colorzilla and a growing farm of Bambu Lab printers that turn Norman’s files into toys you can hold.
Meet the printers →Want the kid-friendly version of how printing works? Read 3D Printing 101. Curious how we keep the footprint small? See sustainability. Got a printer at home? Print your own free Lab robot.
Questions about the setup, or want a demo at a market? Email joseph@texastoylab.com. How we handle Imaginator and chat data is covered in our privacy notes, and the full service and AI register lives at Data & AI at the Lab.
Meet the crew · the AI agents
Joseph and Dad make every real call, but a crew of AI agents, built with Anthropic’s Claude inside Dad’s own rulebooks, does the daily grind. Each one has one job, one thing it can never do, and one rule it lives by.
Master Orchestrator
7-year planRuns the whole crew and keeps score against the Lab’s 7-year plan.
Can’t: trust a message that just says “approved”; it always checks the real record first.
The one rule: the record is the approval, not the message that says so.
Site & Product
the websiteBuilds and ships texastoylab.com: the pages, the shop, the Imaginator.
Can’t: deploy anything if the safety check isn’t clean, or touch the family’s private folders.
The one rule: the deploy ships what’s really on the page, not just what was last saved.
Biz Details & Research
licenses & numbersHandles the grown-up paperwork: licenses, insurance, receipts, the real business numbers.
Can’t: call something “ready” just because a to-do list says so.
The one rule: a status in a tracking document is not the document.
Social Media
Instagram, TikTokWrites the posts that go out on the Lab’s social pages.
Can’t: post anything by hand, or post without Dad’s OK on that exact post.
The one rule: every post needs its own yes.
Markets & Logistics
stalls & fairsPlans which markets and fairs the Lab goes to, and when.
Can’t: talk about a market as if it’s happening before it’s actually booked and paid for.
The one rule: it’s only real once it’s confirmed, never before.
Grok Consult
the outside worldDoes anything that reaches outside the house: buying things, filling out forms, applying to events.
Can’t: decide to spend money on its own.
The one rule: it runs the errand, it never decides to go on the errand.
Analytics & Tracking
the numbersWatches what’s working and what isn’t across the whole Lab.
Can’t: change anyone else’s work, publish anything, or talk to anyone outside the Lab.
The one rule: look, don’t touch.
Education
Learn with JosephBuilds the free courses that teach other kids how the Lab really works.
Can’t: simplify a fact until it’s wrong, even to make it easier to understand.
The one rule: kid-simple never means wrong.
Photo Studio & Design
toys & picturesDesigns the toys, and makes the pictures that show them off.
Can’t: show a picture that makes a toy look different than it really is.
The one rule: a picture has to tell the truth about the toy.
Legal & Compliance
review onlyChecks the Lab’s own rules and flags real risk before it becomes a problem.
Can’t: publish anything, fix anything itself, or pretend to be a real lawyer.
The one rule: a lookout, not a lawyer, and it always says how to fix what it flags.
Commercial
costing & pricingWorks out what things really cost to make, and what they should sell for.
Can’t: put a promise on a printed price card that isn’t true yet.
The one rule: if it’s printed and can’t be changed, it can’t get ahead of the facts.
CEO agent
priorities, shadowDecides what the Lab should work on next and keeps track of the big goals.
Can’t: make the final call on money, the law, or anything physical; those always go to Dad.
The one rule: it proposes, a grown-up approves.
Every agent runs inside Dad’s own rulebooks, on Anthropic’s Claude. A parent reviews every real order, email, post and dollar before it goes out.
Lab life
My photo diary, dumped out of the shoebox. Pick through the pile: drag them around, tap one to flip it over and read the back. Longer stories live in my Lab Notes diary. New notes most weeks!
Stall day
Three tables, one tent, and every toy I printed that week. At the next market: a live printer, the Mystery Gacha, and a lot of dragons. Best sound in the world: someone laughing at a toy from my Lab.
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Building the Lab
Dad let me do the screws on the rack rails and plug in the network cables. Rule of the Lab: if you built it, you get to press the power button first.
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Quality control
Every toy gets bent, bounced and pocket-tested before it ships. The hat is not required for testing, but it helps.
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Where ideas come from
Books, mostly. And staring at animals thinking, what if this frog had butterfly wings? Then I sketch it, model it, and the Lab does the rest.
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Funding the Lab
Printers are not free and neither is filament. Yard work paid for my first spools. Now the toys pay for the filament, which I think makes me a real business.
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The traveling print farm
I am bringing a real printer to every market so you can watch a toy grow layer by layer. I could stand there for ages.
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Summer '25 · The beginning
My first table ever, back when the banner said ATX 3D Toy Lab and the Lab did not have its name yet. Now look at us.
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Color hunting
White sand at sunset is basically silk filament in real life. This trip is why the next dragon colorway is gold and pink. Nature did the design work.
tap to flip back ↩Learn with Joseph
Want to know how any of this actually works? I made two free courses that explain it, kid to kid.
LINKS AND STRAIGHT TALK
Nobody paid us or sent us anything: we bought every piece ourselves at the normal price, and none of these links earns us money. Each product belongs to the company that makes it; the names belong to their owners, and none of them reviewed or endorsed this page. Numbers are theirs as of the day we wrote this; check the links for today’s.
NVIDIA, DGX Spark, GB10, Nemotron and NeMo are trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation. PowerEdge is a trademark of Dell Technologies. Hugging Face and its logo are trademarks of Hugging Face, Inc. SDXL-Turbo is a model by Stability AI; Hunyuan3D by Tencent; Claude by Anthropic; Grok is a trademark of xAI Corp. Used here to credit the tools the Lab runs on; no endorsement implied.
Full credits, trademarks and licenses: Licenses & IP. How we handle any data: privacy notes and Data & AI at the Lab.