With my computer still down, I turned the whole week into a 3D printing sprint. It was the hardware week I had been putting off for months, and losing my machine is what finally forced me into it.
The goal was simple to say and hard to do: give NEURA a real body that can survive real life. A desk companion is going to get bumped, knocked, and eventually dropped, probably by me and definitely by anyone with kids. So I did not just print a nice shell and admire it on the desk. I printed it and then I threw it on the floor.
The drop tests became the rhythm of the whole week. Print a version, drop it from desk height a few times, see where it cracked, and figure out why. The first shells were pretty and weak. Corners split, the seam popped open, and the mount that holds the screen worked itself loose almost every time.
So I iterated. Thicker walls where it kept cracking, rounded corners instead of sharp ones, and a redesigned mount that clips in instead of leaning on glue. Every change meant another print, which meant hours of waiting and watching, and then another round of dropping it to see if the fix actually held.
By the end of the week the body was on something like its sixth version, and it finally took a full desk drop without anything breaking or shaking loose. It is not pretty yet, but it is tough, and tough was the entire point.
The funny part is that this was supposed to be a lost week, the one my dead computer stole from me. Instead it might be the week that moved NEURA the furthest, because a companion you can actually pick up and carry is worth more than one more clever line of code. Sometimes the setback picks your priority for you.