Feature Request: Open Sides

[hf-krechan]

Hi Michael,

first off, I want to thank you for this amazing project! 🙌 The CQ-Gridfinity system has been a game-changer for organizing my home, and I truly appreciate the effort you’ve put into creating and sharing it with the community.

I have been using your project extensively, but I’ve encountered a small challenge with the limited size of the 3D printer’s print bed. For larger boxes, the current designs sometimes exceed the printable area, requiring me to manually split or adjust the models before printing.

It would be helpful if there was a built-in option to open the side of a boxe when needed, with a toggle to determine if one or both sides should be left open. This would provide more flexibility for users with smaller printers while still maintaining the modularity and compatibility of the system.

Here is an example how it could look like

For more details you can find the model on onshape.

Thanks again for your fantastic work! Let me know if I can assist in any way to explore or test this feature.

Best regards, Kevin

[michaelgale]

Hello Kevin, thanks for the kind words and I am glad to hear you're getting good value out of cq-gridfinity! I think your suggested feature is a good idea and worth implementing. The general concept of partitioning a model is not only useful for boxes, but could also be extended to baseplates. Also, I think the open/split feature should also include optional mating features so that they can be securely fastened together--either with complementary "jigsaw" type features or holes for fasteners etc.

[hf-krechan]

I am also a Python developer and would like to support you. If you like I can help with some GitHub Actions to make sure that the tests pass before a pull request can get merged.

[michaelgale]

That's very kind of you to offer! Thanks. I am not very familiar with using GH actions--only used them once on one of my repos a while ago. The only tricky thing with GH actions for this project is setting up CadQuery since it has some binary dependencies wrapping the OpenCascade CAD kernel. I believe they have some pretty robust conda build pipelines which should help. I would also recommend only making linux build/test runners in the beginning since Windows and macOS can be more tricky.

[hf-krechan]

Even Linux was a little bit tricky for me ^^ I am not familiar with conda itself.

But I managed to get it running. https://github.com/michaelgale/cq-gridfinity/pull/13

[michaelgale]

Thanks for the PR. It's been integrated and I added a badge icon to the Readme to show the action's status.

[michaelgale]

Re-opened to keep enhancement feature open as a reminder.

[flounderpinto]

I came here to request this same feature. I think specifying the argument would be a little tricky. Maybe something like --excludewalls [1,2,3,4] where 1,2,3,4 are the wall numbers to exclude? So, for example: --excludewalls 1 or --excludewalls 1,3. So wall 1 would be the wall that can have the label (i.e. the "front wall"), and then 2,3,4 going clock-wise around the box. Excluding multiple walls allows you to piece together more than just 2.

This is a great tool. Thanks for putting it together.

[michaelgale]

Thanks for the input on argument specification and for your kind words -- glad you like using this library! I'm still figuring out a clean way to implement this feature.