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Spicy
12/16/2019 at 22:45 • 2 commentsThe kitchen in our hacker space needed a better solution for its spices. The wire frame shelf was disorganized and just not that great over all. Turns out you can get some nice tin cans for spices for just like 70ct each - already coated in black paint that can easily be laser-etched away. Now we just needed a new kind of rack that holds a lot of them. The obvious solution would be tilting them so you can read what's on the lid and each can be accessed directly. I was already thinking about a variant of the wine rack just with each cell tilted upward. But then there was a better idea: Have the cans sink into a horizontal plate:
Although the rack is made specifically for the black cans it turns out other more or less cylindrical objects of more or less the same size also fit in well enough.
While getting the math right and creating the ellipse arcs was a bit tricky the rack itself is easy to assemble:
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Boxes International
08/22/2019 at 22:07 • 0 commentsBoxes now supports multiple - ok, ehmm, ... nearly two - languages. This started several weeks ago with a request to support a Portguese/Brazilian translation. But this only got finished because
For now the web UI uses the preferred language set in the browser to find a language to translate to. I will probably add another means to change the language. Any particular style you'd like to see this done? As mentioned above there only exists a Chinese version with a few pieces still missing as I just now added them.
If you are interested in other language you can go Zanata page and start working on them. Drop me a note here or open a ticket if you think the translation is ready to be merged. If you don't want to bother with yet another online tool you can also get the POT file from the repository and translate it locally.
Update: Added a drop down box to select the language to the page footer. It's still pretty ugly. I still need to look into the CSS stuff necessary to make it fit the overall design of the page.
Update2: I just received a French translation from Georges Khaznadar who is also packaging Boxes.py for Debian.
The situation with Zanata - which was already kinda fishy in the summer - is now at a point where we need to make plans to move somewhere else (as is the Fedora project). I am currently considering https://hosted.weblate.org but I still have not much experience with the hole l10n business. Any advice is welcome.
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Quick update
07/11/2019 at 23:38 • 0 commentsDespite things being quiet here on Hackaday upstream development made quite some progress. We got a set of slat wall panels for our wood work shop. So I created a whole set of tool holders that can be hooked in a slat wall. Good pictures are still missing but the new "Slatwall" section is already in the on-line generator.
Thanks to Stefan the post processing step is now parsing and re-writing the SVG properly. This allowed to add the parameters / URL as a comment in the SVG file and move the drawing to the origin. It also opens up a new set of possibilities for further post processing.
Stumbling on DeWalt Drill Battery esk8 Electric Skateboard motivated me to finally add an adaptor for Makita Batteries. While it needs a bit more work to offer it as a useful building block I already created a mobile bench power supply that can run from either an 18V Makita battery or an Lenovo power supply using the popular DSP5005 module. The MaktiaPowerSupply generator can already be found in the "Misc" section. To be honest it is basically little more than a simple box and the interesting parts are all vitamins. Nevertheless the result is quite handy.
Overall I hope things will slow down a little at some point so I can write dedicated log entries on all the new pieces and show some pictures of the results. In the mean time you can have fun with the brand new FlexBox5.
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More and better Docs
03/04/2019 at 21:55 • 0 commentsI held a workshop at my local hacker space on how to write your own generators. As a side effect I restructured and extended the (API) docs and one participant updated the installation instructions. So now there are several new topics covered:
- Installation on Windows
- Installation on MacOS
- List of all generators
- Architecture Overview
- Explanation of all the funny arcs (burn correction)
- Examples on how to get things done
The API docs have now more of an top down approach. This makes it easier to understand the concepts and where to start. Also the previously broken module index is fixed and all the methods are referenced in the index.
There are still a lot of places the docs can be improved but I am trying to stop myself here. Overall it is probably better to crank out a few new features than loosing myself in the documentation. I guess most people are happy not needing to read docs and being able to generate a new box with the press of a single button.
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Ponoko optimized SVG
02/26/2019 at 22:26 • 0 commentsDifferent laser cutter software need different formats and also different styles even with in the same file format. Traditionally lines have the width of the actual laser cut. Normal cuts are black and for quite a while now holes are rendered blue. But this is not the right thing to do for all use cases. One such use case was Ponoko - an online manufacturing service that does laser cutting. There the lines need to be thin and also need a different color scheme. wayn3w did not only add a new format - svg_Ponoko - but re-factored a lot of other code.
There are still several tickets open to optimize the SVG or adjust some details. Unfortunately the graphics library used (cairo) limits the things that can be changed - easily. But if you need different colors or line width settings this is quite doable now. Please speakup either here in the comments or - preferably - in a GitHub ticket.
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Box with Sliding Lid
12/21/2018 at 19:47 • 0 commentsI made a new type of box with a sliding lid made of flex:
This first prototype is a bit stiff as I used coarser settings for the flex of the lid. The hope was the lid would be a bit more robust. Now the generator uses a setting in between that works just fine if the sliding surfaces are treated with wax. Rubbing a candle on the left and right most part of the lid does the job. I also sanded the front edges of the lid so they don't get caught on ridges along the track.
The inner corner is not made with flex but multiple straight pieces connected with non orthogonal finger joints.
This is a bit more robust as it is in part the inner bottom of the box.
I also added another variant in which the lid continues around the second top corner, too. Sorry, no good pictures yet.
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Anyone using Boxes.py in Inkscape?
11/27/2018 at 19:08 • 3 commentsI have been thinking about adding generators for the basic building blocks like walls, edges, ... That would probably pretty easy to do - although not that exciting. I thought that might be most interesting for the Inkscape plug-in. Then you could build your own, one of project from those primitives without bothering with Python and programming.
But as we still don't have a way to get Boxes.py running on Windows I wonder how many people actually use the Inkscape plug-in at all. Well, I don't...
Otoh having those primitives available might be interesting for the web UI, too. Not as convenient as one needs to go through all the Save as, Open, Cut and Paste hoops. But may be some people are doing this anyway but have to look through the generators to find the parts they need.
So the question to everyone: Are you using the Inkscape plug-in and would you be interested in generators for simple parts? Please comment below!
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New Generators and Features
10/31/2018 at 08:21 • 0 commentsI promised new generators. Luckily several people sent some in. So there is a pretty long list:
- PaintStand from Jens Persson is a stackable stand for small paint bottles based in this video from Tested.
- CardBox also from Jens Persson can house a number of playing card decks and features a nice slide in lid.
- TwoPiece is simple box with another box as a lid that slides over the first one. While I rewrote large parts of the generator the idea and first implementation was submitted by bobm123 quite a while ago.
- DisplayCase from Alexander Bulimov is a simple closed box optimized to be cut from acrylic for displaying small objects.
- RoyalGame of Ur is an ancient board game featured in this video from the British Museum
- LaserClamp can hold warped plywood down on a knife table. This already kinda works but it will probably still change form to work more conveniently.
Additionally some old things got improved:
- Most flex boxes now have a latchsize parameter to allow cutting them much smaller
- Cabinet hinges can now be mounted on the outside of the box
- The HingeBox supports a split lid that opens to both sides
- The move parameter in the parts API now supports "mirror" to make rendering symmetrical parts easier
Update:
I got pictures for at least some of the new boxes / generators:
PaintStorage (by Blancanegra)
CardBox
TwoPiece
DisplayCase (by abulimov)
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Finally!
09/24/2018 at 16:07 • 2 commentsOK, OK. I know you are actually all waiting for cool new boxes and other generators - or at least new features for the existing ones. But there is even more infrastructure work that need to be done. I do have some new generators in some - not quite finished - branches. So there will be new stuff to cut out. I promise!
One long standing issue with the project has been the logo. The web site used a gray cube that was added as a place holder in the web UI mock up and just didn't get replaced. I wanted the logo to also be a box generator and I have a branch that does that. It applies some transformation matrices to render a box with finger joints in an isometric projection. But the result was still closer to a technical drawing that a proper logo. After some encouragement in the GitHub tickets I finally ditched the idea and sketched something in Inkscape. It's not that great but it is a box that's green like a Python (mascot) and has a laser welding it together. There is probably some things that can be improved. The contrast between the greens and the light gray used as a background in many web browsers could be better and and the laser could be nicer, brighter ans shinier. But so far I am happy with what I have achieved - given my artistic talent. If you have some design skills and some improvements feel free to open an pull request.
PS: The logo is also - finally - used as a favicon. So I can now find all those still open boxes browser tabs.
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Update for the Web Instance
09/17/2018 at 15:50 • 0 commentsSome may have noted that I recently added a Dockerfile to the repository. Playing around a bit more I moved the public web instance into a more modern docker container. This is not in its final form. Several things still need to be done right. Nevertheless it already solves two long standing and annoying issues:
- Messed up fonts
- No pstoedit and though no support for dxf and other formats
For the later I still need to fix the docs with still state those formats or only available for local installations.
Overall the docker container is considered being in beta test. So if you encounter any issues, please report here or in a GH ticket. But in general I expect things to work.
Update:
Turns out this simple setup is not good enough for a public instance. I added uWSGI - a light weight web server - to the container. So now there are multiple processes and threads handling the requests. I also created a systemd service file for the container so it gets started and restarted automatically.
I did not update the Dockerfile in the repository as I guess most people won't be using it to run their own public instance but would rather use it for development where having one single process with the SimpleHttpServer is just fine. It also contains a few specifics of my setup.