Folded paper boxes

After attending the first Processing study group, I set out to use Processing to generate files for my favorite thing… laser cutting.

I needed something to package my Tinysaurs in, and got tired of having to manually draw out the box template every time I wanted different dimensions. So I wrote a program to take the dimensions I want and spit out a box. They end up looking like this:

Processing has a PDF export library which I use to generate the template in PDF format, which Corel Draw is able to read. Processing also has an SVG export library, but I didn’t have much luck getting it to work. I’m looking into using Python instead of Processing, because it apparently has a nice DXF library, but so far Processing is working pretty well.

If you want to check it out, the box generating program is available in the NYC Resistor SVN repository. Which is public, hooray! The code is only vaguely commented, but it should be pretty clear what it’s doing. Maybe. Leave questions in the comments if you have any!

Of course you don’t need a laser to cut these out, and xacto knife would work just fine. But… I have a laser so I use it. You can get the pre-generated PDFs of boxes in various sizes on my blog, http://www.kellbot.com