- Set the size. Open Box and type the outside size in millimetres. Depth is the assembled height — body and lid together measure exactly that.
- Cut the holes. Open Cutouts, pick a shape or a ready-made part. Drag it around the board, and type the exact position in the readout that appears on the right.
- Export STL. You get two files, a body and a lid, that fit each other. Open them in Cura, PrusaSlicer or OrcaSlicer and print.
Everything is in millimetres, everywhere. A 12 mm hole comes off the printer measuring 12 mm. Nothing you draw here leaves your machine: the box is built in your browser and the files are written there too.
The six faces
A button box is not just a front panel — the cable has to come out somewhere, and nobody puts the socket next to the buttons. Face, at the right-hand end of the strip above the board, chooses which side of the box you are drawing on. Each face keeps its own cutouts, and the small number beside a face is how many are already on it.
- Front
- the panel you look at, and where everything mounts
- Top edge · Bottom edge
- the long walls, along the top and bottom of the drawing
- Left side · Right side
- the short walls down either side
- Floor
- the underside, drawn as if you were looking through the box, which is where a box gets bolted to a rig
Both rulers on a wall run the same way as the front panel's, so a socket at 30 mm along a wall lines up with a hole at 30 mm on the front. The second ruler on a wall is how deep the box is, measured down from the rim the lid closes onto. A cutout right at the rim is cut through the lid's rim as well, so the lid closing does not shut it in.
Working on the board
The board is the front face of the panel, drawn to scale, with a millimetre ruler down the top and the left. Switch to 2D at the top right if you are looking at the solid.
- Click
- select a cutout. Its numbers appear in the readout on the right
- Drag
- move it. It snaps to the grid, to the middle of the panel, and to the centre of any other cutout
- Drag a corner
- resize it. The opposite edge stays where it is
- Drag the round handle
- turn a rectangle. It stops every 15°
- Shift + drag
- keep the move on one axis, or keep a rectangle's proportions while resizing
- Alt + drag
- turn every snap off for the length of that one drag
- Shift + click
- add a cutout to the selection, or take it out
- Drag on empty space
- draw a box around several cutouts to select them together
- Scroll
- zoom the board in and out around the pointer
- Right-drag · middle-drag · Space + drag
- slide the board around
The six tools along the bottom
- Box
- Enclosure makes a body and a lid, printed as two files. Panel only makes one flat plate with the holes in it and nothing else. Then the outside size, the corner radius, and how thick the walls and the front panel are. Save and Open keep the whole design as a small file on your own machine, so you can come back to it.
- Cutouts
- Three plain shapes — a round hole, a rectangle, a rounded rectangle — and a list of parts people actually buy. Each preset shows the hole it needs and carries a tag: STD means the hole size is the part's own specification, USUAL means it is the normal size for that family of parts, and CHECK means it varies by manufacturer and you should measure the one in your hand before printing. Anything you place lands in the middle of the panel and can be moved and resized like any other cutout.
- Arrange
- Line several cutouts up by their edges or their centres, spread them out with even gaps, or centre them on the panel. Make a row is the quick way to a bank of buttons: select one hole, say how many across and down and how far apart, and it repeats it. The gap is measured centre to centre, and the original stays where it is.
- Objects
- Everything cut into the box, newest first, from every face. A row on a face you are not looking at is labelled with that face, and clicking it takes you there. Click a row to select it on the board, double-click the name to rename it. The four small buttons hide it, lock it so it cannot be dragged by accident, duplicate it, or delete it. A hidden cutout is not cut into the exported file.
- Assembly
- How the lid is held on, and this is where the posts live.
Screws builds four posts inside the body, one in each corner, each with a hole straight through the lid above it. You never place them by hand: Screw size — M2.5, M3, M4 or M5 — sets how fat the post is, how wide the hole it is drilled for, and how big the countersink is, all at once, and Posts, in from the corner is how far in they stand. They are the dashed circles on the board, labelled with the screw they take, and nothing may be cut where they are.
Snap uses a bead that clicks into a groove instead, and needs no screws at all — but how well it holds depends on your filament and your tolerances, so print one before you print eight. Loose leaves the lid free.
Clearance is the gap between the lid and the inside of the body: raise it if the lid comes out too tight to close. Mounting holes is something else entirely — holes through the lid for bolting the finished box to a rig.
- Check
- Everything about the design that would make it hard to print or impossible to use: a wall too thin to hold together, a hole hanging off the edge, two holes too close to leave any material between them, a cutout sitting on top of a screw post. Every warning quotes the actual measurement, and Show me selects the cutout it is about. The number on the button is how many are open. This is not a slicer and it does not pretend to be one — it only finds the obvious problems.
Seeing the solid
- 2D · Split · 3D
- the drawing, both side by side, or just the solid. Split needs a reasonably wide window
- Both · Body · Lid · Apart
- what to show. Apart lifts the lid off so you can see the posts and the rim underneath
- Drag
- turn the box around
- Shift + drag · right-drag
- slide the view
- Scroll
- zoom
- The corner button
- put the camera back where it started
The 3D view is only ever a picture of the last finished build. It updates on its own as you draw.
The little bar in the corner
- Grid
- show or hide the squares on the panel
- The number beside it
- how big one square is, in millimetres. It is also how far one press of an arrow key moves something
- Magnet
- snap what you drag to those squares
- Crosshair
- snap to the middle of the panel and to the centres of the other cutouts, and draw a line when it catches
- Frame
- fit the whole panel back on screen
Keyboard
- undo
- redo
- duplicate what is selected
- select everything
- Arrow keys
- move by one grid square. Hold Shift for ten squares, Alt for a tenth of a millimetre
- Delete · Backspace
- remove what is selected
- Esc
- deselect, or close the panel that is open
Good to know
- The dashed line just inside the panel is where the body's wall lands. A cutout crossing it opens onto the wall instead of into the box, and whatever you mount there will not fit.
- The dashed circles at the corners are the screw posts. Nothing can be cut where they stand, and Check will tell you if something is.
- When a cutout is selected, the numbers on the board are how far it sits from each edge. They turn red when there is almost no material left.
- Depth is the whole box, lid included. A 35 mm box with a 3 mm front panel has a 32 mm body.
- Nothing is saved by itself. Use Save in the Box panel before you close the tab, and the tool will ask before you leave if there is anything to lose.
- The exported files are checked before they are written: every surface closed, every measurement the one you typed. If a file would not have been printable, nothing is downloaded and Check says why.
