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.
If anyone wants to give the box a go, the fusion 360 file is available to download.
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