Caisson AI
Questions
Short answers about Caisson AI and each of its projects.
the Arachnid slicer
What is the Arachnid slicer?
Arachnid is a slicer for STL, OBJ and 3MF files, written in Rust by Caisson AI. It optimises for wall-clock print time rather than for nominal speed numbers.
How fast is the Arachnid slicer compared with Bambu Studio?
On the reference 3DBenchy (225,706 triangles, 0.24 mm layers, 1 wall, 6% infill, Bambu A1 profile) Arachnid scores 8m 23s against 19m 10s for Bambu Studio 2.8. It emits 25,203 moves where Bambu Studio emits 73,000, and it slices the file in 1.35 s against 4 s.
Which file formats does Arachnid slice?
STL, OBJ and 3MF.
Does Arachnid have a graphical interface?
Yes. Arachnid Studio is the graphical front end, a fork of Cura whose engine backend is replaced and shells out to the Arachnid binary.
Where can I download the Arachnid slicer?
The Windows 64 bit build is at downloads.caissonai.co/arachnid.zip. The zip holds arachnid.exe, a README and the CaNa Licence 1.0 text.
How does Arachnid send a job to the printer?
Over the local network by FTPS and MQTT, with no cloud account needed.
Unitylist and Unitylist SQL
What is Unitylist?
Unitylist is a difference-encoded columnar store written in Rust. Each cell holds the cheapest recipe for rebuilding its value from a reference value called a sink, unless storing the value raw is cheaper.
What is Unitylist SQL?
The SQL engine of Unitylist. WHERE compiles to a typed predicate evaluated in parallel over shared column vectors, with zone-map pruning, hash aggregation and top-k ordering when a limit is present. Joins fall back to a row engine with a hash join.
Which SQL does Unitylist support?
SELECT, WHERE, DISTINCT, GROUP BY and HAVING, aggregates, ORDER BY, LIMIT and OFFSET, JOIN and LEFT JOIN, UNION, WITH, batched INSERT, in-place UPDATE, physical DELETE and EXPLAIN.
What is a sink in Unitylist?
A sink is the reference value a cell is rebuilt from. Compression plans sinks by measured wire bits, so there is no fixed cluster count.
What is Unitylist spatial mode?
A separate store, USPT v4, where a sink is a coordinate plot: a grid cell for point tables or a primary key bucket for relational tables. An ST_DWithin query rejects sinks that cannot reach the radius without opening their files.
How fast is Unitylist?
On 2 million rows a store opens in 1.0 ms, down from 350 ms, and GROUP BY with SUM takes 15.8 ms, down from 2,137 ms. Peak memory fell from 750 MB to 222 MB.
Venus AI, VenusMCP and the Venus CLI
What is Venus AI?
Venus is the name of two things from Caisson AI: a terminal coding platform that convenes a council of models, and VenusMCP, a hosted server that gives other assistants search, images, music and research.
What is VenusMCP?
VenusMCP exposes Venus as MCP tools, so any client that speaks MCP can use them. It also ships as a plugin definition for ChatGPT, and it lives at venusmcp.caissonai.co.
What is the Venus CLI?
A terminal-first multi-agent coding platform written in C#. A prompt is worked by a council of models, and editor, verifier and adversarial models critique the result until it fulfils the prompt or hits the iteration limit.
Which model providers does Venus support?
Seven. Any role can be bound to any model from those providers, with one global key per provider.
Can Venus run without API keys?
Yes. A built-in simulation provider runs the whole workflow offline with no keys.
Stargazer
What is Stargazer?
Stargazer is an ADS-B tracker for a directional receiver. It scores the antenna against adsb.fi, estimates aperture and range, and saves every decoded position so it can be replayed.
How does Stargazer score an antenna?
It polls adsb.fi every five seconds and counts, per degree of bearing, how often an aircraft that the public network sees is also heard locally. Only aircraft beyond 50 km and above the radio horizon count.
What do I need to run Stargazer?
Node 22 and nothing else. The receiver position is worked out from the feed.
Does Stargazer send data to an aggregator?
No. Feeding adsb.fi from the same receiver would make every aircraft the antenna hears look like a hit and spoil the score.
Liquox
What is Liquox?
Liquox is a Liquid Glass material for Windows in OpenGL. Shapes act as lenses joined by a smooth-min field, and they bend the background at the rim with spectral dispersion and specular highlights.
Is Liquox the same as winliqglass?
Yes. Liquox was called winliqglass before it was renamed, and the old address redirects to the Liquox page.
Why does Liquox not use backdrop blur?
Frost defaults to zero. Heavy backdrop blur makes a render read as fogged plastic, so the rim does the work: a hairline highlight, a narrow bevel and a clear interior.
How does Liquox render glass?
In two passes, so knobs and toolbar glass sample the scene beneath them. The spectral edge recombines eight wavelength taps.
Tantalum
What is Tantalum?
Tantalum is a photo studio application for Windows, built on .NET 9, with live camera preview, photo analysis, Real-ESRGAN upscaling and four window layouts.
Which version of Tantalum is current?
The current version of the desktop client is 1.3.0.
What window layouts does Tantalum have?
Standard, Compact, Wide and Cinematic.
What is Tantalum built with?
An Avalonia desktop client on .NET 9 with a Node backend for accounts and downloads. Sign-in works through Google, and the app updates itself.
Quiblet, zodiac, Printer music, gflive and Wharfie
What is Quiblet?
A codec between binary data and audio built on a lookup table, written in Rust. A frequency splits into a slot digit and a four digit payload, and every bit length survives the round trip.
What is the zodiac cipher solver?
A homophonic cryptogram solver and encoder in Rust aimed at the Zodiac ciphers. It has no crate dependencies and scores candidates against dense n-gram language models.
What is Printer music?
Scripts that turn MIDI, Guitar Pro files and hand-written scores into G-code for the Bambu A1, so its stepper motors play the tune.
What is gflive?
A live AFL win-probability server that runs an in-play simulation over the league feed.
What is Wharfie?
A viewer that takes an RTSP feed, detects the game horn in the audio and replays the stadium hooter in its place.
Caisson AI
What is Caisson AI?
Caisson AI builds software and machines from scratch: the Arachnid slicer, the Unitylist SQL database, Venus and VenusMCP, Stargazer, Liquox, Tantalum and five smaller builds.
How do I contact Caisson AI?
Email hello@caissonai.co. If email does not get through, message Caisson on Instagram at @aicaisson.
Does caissonai.co use cookies or analytics?
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