Boxbot

NOTE: This gem is not yet finished, and is work in progress.

BoxBot aims to generate an SVG or PDF template that is meant to be used with a laser cutter. Boxbot will generate a 2D cut layout for a 3D box (parallelepiped) with matching tabs that allow the box to be "snapped into place" without screws, although screws and T-joins can also be added. This gem is currently work in progress, and is a rewrite of the laser-cutter box drawing logic.

Layouts

The following is an example layout of the box that's 5x4x3 (width, height, depth):

Kerf

Kerf is the width of the laser-cutting beam. The following diagram depicts how Boxbot generates templates with the non-zero Kerf defined. The yellow line below is where the laser cuts, the red/black are the areas of the material removed by the laser cutter. The light blue is the "desired" shape of the tabs.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'boxbot'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install boxbot

Usage

Soon.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/kigster/boxbot.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.