How the box goes together
The box is six flat panels — front, back, two sides, top and bottom — joined with finger joints along every edge. Where two panels meet, one panel's fingers fit into the other's notches, so the edges lock together and the joint is square without any jig.
Every edge has an odd number of fingers, so both ends of an edge belong to the same panel. The front and back own the outer corners, which keeps the front face clean from the side. Top and bottom come out as identical plates: glue both in, or leave the top loose as a lid so you can reach the LEDs.
Box size
Width, depth and height are the outer dimensions of the finished box, fingers included — the inside is one material thickness smaller on every side. Each side must be at least 30 mm (or eight times the material thickness, if that's more), and at most 1000 mm.
Finger width
Finger width (under Advanced settings) is a target, not an exact size. Each edge is divided into the nearest odd number of equal fingers, with at least three per edge, so the fingers on a long edge and a short edge can differ slightly. The finger width must be at least twice the material thickness — narrower fingers get fragile and burn away.
Kerf compensation
Kerf is the width of material your laser actually burns away along the cut line, so a cut part always ends up a little smaller than the line you drew. To keep the joints snug, every panel outline — fingers and notches included — is grown outward by half the kerf.
The letter holes and the back hole are drawn at their nominal size, so they come out about one kerf wider — that doesn't affect the fit. Cut two joining corners in your actual material first and adjust the Kerf field until the joint is as tight as you like.
Front text
The text is set on one line, centered on the front panel and scaled as large as it fits inside a margin of the material thickness plus 5 mm. A short word therefore comes out tall, and a long one comes out small — make the box wider if a long text gets too small.
Characters the chosen font doesn't have are left out, and a warning lists which ones.
Arcade vs. Budmo Jigglish
- Arcade (included) — every horizontal stripe of the letters is cut through, so the light shines out in scanlines. The thin bars of material between the stripes hold the front together; if they drop below 1.5 mm, you get a warning. Make the box wider or the text shorter for a sturdier front.
- Budmo Jigglish (upload your own) — a marquee-style font with round bulbs inside each letter. The holes are cut through and the border line around them is engraved (blue in the file). Its free license doesn't allow it to be hosted here, so you download it from dafont and choose the file. It's kept only in your browser and never sent anywhere. Choose
budmo jigglish.otffrom the zip, not Budmo Jiggler. If your copy is a different version than the one the tool was tested with, it still works as long as the holes can be found, but you're asked to check the preview carefully.
Back hole
The back panel gets a hole for the power cable, either centered or to the left or right — left and right as seen from the front of the box, the way you'll usually look at it. In the cut sheet the back panel is drawn as seen from behind, so a hole you chose on the left shows up on the right side of that piece. The hole comes in two shapes:
- USB-C — a slot with rounded ends, 10.5 × 5.4 mm by default. Adjust the size under Advanced settings to fit your plug.
- Round — a circle with the diameter you set, e.g. for a DC barrel jack or a grommet.
Hole bottom above box bottom (Advanced settings) is the distance from the outside bottom of the box to the lowest edge of the hole — for a USB-C plug on a board lying on the bottom plate, that's roughly the board's height plus the plate thickness. The whole hole has to sit between the bottom plate and the top plate.
Hole distance from side of box (Advanced settings, only for left or right) is measured from the outside of the side wall to the nearest edge of the hole. It must be at least twice the material thickness, so the hole stays clear of the side wall and its finger joints.
Downloading & the cut sheet
Pick SVG or DXF with the ▾ next to the download button. Both use the same lines: black = cut through, blue = engrave (in DXF, on the layers CUT and ENGRAVE). Set the matching operations in your laser software. Within each piece the engrave lines come first, so they run before the piece is cut loose.
The pieces are laid out in two columns, each piece on its own row, so it's easy to delete one from the file before cutting:
Front in its own file
Tick Front in its own file under the download button and you get two buttons instead of one: Download without front (back, sides, top and bottom) and Download front. Both follow the SVG/DXF choice. That way you can cut the body of the box ahead of time, and cut the front once you know what it should say.
About
This tool was built for Reaktor 51, a makerspace in Trondheim, Norway, by one of its members. We hope it's useful to makers everywhere — the more boxes that light up, the better.