Making Laser Cut Boxes with Inkscape

A good way to make enclosures and containers for various projects is to laser cut them. Chinese CO2 Laser cutters are getting increasingly cheap and widespread.

One approach is to simply draw a few layers, cut them from acrylic and glue them together, like I did for the encoder tester:

But there is a box making plugin available for Inkscape for making actual boxes:

https://github.com/paulh-rnd/TabbedBoxMaker

Rectangular boxes come out at the press of a button:

and can easily be modified manually:

At the time of this writing there is an incompatibility between the latest version of Inkscape and the plugin, with error messages like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):   File "ell_box.py", line 230, in <module>     effect.affect()   File "/usr/share/inkscape/extensions/inkex.py", line 263, in affect     self.getoptions(args)   File "/usr/share/inkscape/extensions/inkex.py", line 159, in getoptions     self.options, self.args = self.OptionParser.parse_args(args) AttributeError: EllipticalBox instance has no attribute 'OptionParser'

The issue is tracked here:

https://github.com/BvdP/elliptical-box-maker/issues/3

I submitted a fix, so there may not be an issue at the time of reading this, but just in case, I am attaching the fix below: