New Layer by Layer! Designing Foldable Boxes in Fusion 360
I’ve been playing with the sheet metal tools in Autodesk Fusion 360 and trying to come up with foldable box designs that can house electronics and components. This is apart of our new cardboard initiative that utilizes low-cost materials to make fast prototypes for fun and creative projects. The sheet metal modeling environment in Fusion 360 has a great set of tools that makes designing these type of projects intuitive. The ability to “unfold” your designs via a flat pattern is very handy. You can quickly export the pattern as a DXF that can be sent to an entry-level vinyl cutter like the Cricut or Silhouette. The process is quite quick compared to 3D printing. The box I made in the tutorial takes about 3 minutes to cut. Using chipboard material allows for these boxes to be fairly sturdy and reusable.
We recently put together a papercraft version of the Makie Robot (Maker Faire’s Mascot) where the circuit playground express, micro servo and battery pack are housed in the foldable box.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
