Did you know I love Christmas?

There are people you like, good food, hugs, presents, and for one afternoon all is fine.

Last Christmas I decided to do something a bit different: I tried shipping every one of my friends a present, no matter where they were.

And to package them I decided to 3D print a bunch of boxes. To create the boxes, I hopped into Fusion and in no time I had a box and a lid and they fit alright.

I printed and shipped a lot of these, but since I bricked my phone before backing it up, all I have from that time is this Instagram story.

In a previous life I would apologize for the mess, but on this one I decided to have fun.

All boxes had slightly different dimensions: Some were larger for turrón, others thinner for books, and some were just 200mm³ cubes with all the chocolate and IKEA Christmas decor I could fit inside.

For every different box however, I had to boot into Windows, launch Fusion, fiddle with the parameters, click around to export the two parts to STL and then hop into PrusaSlicer. Mega annoying – there had to be a better way to do this.

So to encourage further sharing of festive cheer and to have a less annoying experience myself, now we have boxgen

It is one of those AI-gen toy projects, but in my defense it works, is useful, and I had fun

You can generate boxes of various dimensions and then print them. The lid fitment tolerances are deliberately on the loose side. Here’s a test run of a generated box.

Of course the boxes can be for anything you want – but think of that old friend you have. How about you send him or her something? I’m sure you would make their day.