Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Designing and 3D printing a case for your
home automation project
The third step in designing your own home automation system is to design a custom case
for your product. This was a really costly process in the past, as you needed to find a manu-
facturer for your product and generally produce several thousands of units to have a good
price for each unit produced.
Fortunately, 3D printing changed all that. We can now prototype individual systems at a
very low cost using this technology. In this section, we are going to see how to make the
3D design of a simple case for our Arduino system. We are also going to see how to send it
to a manufacturer so that it can be 3D printed.
And to do so, we are going to use software called OpenSCAD. This is an open source
design software where you can actually write code to make your designs. This is perfect if
you are not a designer but more of a coder, and it also allows you to make parametric
designs that can easily be modified and shared. You can download OpenSCAD from the
following URL:
When you open a new project in OpenSCAD, the following is what you should get:
