It's been a while since the last proper log entry...

The last few years were not that great for many things - including Boxes.py. But even with things going slow or not moving anywhere for months a lot of changes have piled up over this long time. Also it looks like this year is a lot better and things have actually already picked up speed in December of last year. Not only have I been able to do more but several old and new contributors have shown up and gave the project a very notable boost. To deal with the long backlog of new features and box generators while there is so much new stuff coming in I decide to mix in the old with the new.

Wall Mounted Boxes and Tool Holders

After a brief discussion here in the comments in early 2022 I factored and renamed the SlatWall group to WallMounted. While slat walls are fancy not many people have them. The whole group is only there because a few panels fell into the hands of our hacker space. Now the generators can have different styles of hooks and also work with DIN rails or French Cleats. It is relatively easy to add new ways of hooking the boxes and tool holders to different things. So it you have ideas open a ticket on GitHub - or start a discussion in the comments below.

There are also few new generators in this group:

• SlatWallPinRow allows you to hang stuff on the wall.
• WallStairs allows you to design your own tool holders.

and I recently added a few more sample images.

On the search for the right box generator

Caleb Crome is one of our new and very prolific contributors. One theme of his work is making finding the right box generator easier. He wrote a Gallery page that shows all sample images side by side for a quick overview.

The second, complementary new feature is a search field on the menu page. It shows all matching box generators and matches the English name but also the translated name and short description. This is all done with some - not even too complicated - Java Script magic directly in the browser.

A third feature is not merged yet. It will allow getting or adding QR codes with a link and settings of a generated box. That way it is easier to pass the settings around with a mobile phone or to figure out how to get the drawing from an already laser cut piece.

These new features are not all Caleb has done so far. Prepare to hear more from him as soon as we get into new generators.