Not gridfinity compatible, but I have a set of corner pieces that uses a similar concept. The majority of the material can be scrap acrylic, mdf, cardboard, etc. and you just print the corner pieces. Lids and stuff too.

https://www.printables.com/model/57813-boxkit-parts-for-maki...

3d printing is great, but a lot of wasted plastic if you print large organizers and stuff like that.

Wow this is amazing.

That is a great improvement, but best would be a combination of both designs, the former adding the "finder shelf that can also serve for labeling, and the slopped bottom that allows scooping out individual pieces.

Another improvement may be to make the top and bottom pieces stackable along with the snapping grid system compatibility.

Creator yes, but is Gridfinity not based on this video from Alexandre Chapel? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHFK5sY8ToE

> full of amazing tongue twisters

You mean, always amazingly augmented, aspiring to alienate all other audible aspirations? Zach is always a treat.

Yeah his video was linked on the page and i found him incredibly entertaining. Agreed, he’s a very clever writer.

It took me a long time to convince myself he wasn't the actor from Numb3rs.

For anyone looking to get into those storage systems I can also highly recommend "Hands on Katie"'s Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@handsonkatie - There are a few videos that go into different storage systems and how to combine them to cover different storage needs and vertical/horizontal surfaces.

Her Discord is also quite active with people interested in the space, and Underware (under the desk cable management system), Neogrid and Deskware are all storage systems that have came out of her community.

for the wall there is now also opengrid https://www.printables.com/model/1214361-opengrid-walldesk-m...

Why mention multiboard and not honeycomb storage wall (HSW)? It's open source and arguably a better ecosystem.

For walls there is also the GOEWS (Greatly Over Engineered Wall System) - https://goews.xyz

However personally, I've also been a fan of IKEA Skadis boards, as it's quite easy to get up and running in terms of a baseplate + there are already a lot of models for it out there.

Can recommend Honeycomb Storage Wall. Printed it two weeks ago, so far I am super happy with it. I've tried multiboard previously, but only a few segments. It was harder to print, I had it for a year and never really got into accessories, it felt too limiting.

Thanks for posting these, the play conveyor ones are so clean and well designed , i've been watching them on youtube from time to time, havent decided to go with gridfinity or play conveyor yet tho

OK, a hex grid wall is really appealing. Now I just need to find a local printer ..

When I visit that page, the thumbnail of the embedded youtube video displays automatically and shows a gridfinity setup with a wide variety of tools in it. Presumably he's presuming that people can see that.

Same, hah. The similarity between gridwall and powerwall in another comment also snagged me. "Perfboard" has also gotten me before- both are perforated board, but one is used for quick circuit boards and the other (more commonly called pegboard) is a wall-mounted modular hook system for storage.

Based on the title alone I was thinking it was a solution for storing grids... not that I had any idea what kind of grid one might need to store.

This. Every commercial system I've used changes or is discontinued. I now take my storage into my own hands, even if it takes longer.

There is also the option to do half bins / half grid pattern at the edge. So you have the normal 42x42 grid pattern, then on one edge there are 21x42 sized boxes. There are a number of designs that support the half grid pattern. This would reduce your maximum lost space down to 20mm, and you would still have compatibility with the gridfinity system.

There is a fusion 360 plugin where you can customize all this. You won't be able to download everything out there for the default grid size, but you can make your own.

What does “draw” mean in this context?

I am actually beginning work on a fork which uses 21mm (half normal size) as the basis grid) --- a lot of my work (and attendant hardware) is smaller scale, so hoping that will work out well.

What I do is print custom bins to store long things on the side of the grid. Making it smaller or bigger would not have fixed anything.

Along these lines, foam core board is a super common and effective material for making drawer organizers and little boxes. It's very cheap and holds together surprisingly well with hot glue or super glue. Adam Savage is a huge fan of it and he's tried everything.

I needed to organize a bunch of tools and other miscellaneous items in a closet. I tried printing a few Gridfinity items, but quickly realized that it wasn't worth the time, effort and filament + electricity costs. I ended up going to the dollar store and buying a bunch of plastic containers and some labels, and managed to get everything organized in an hour and for under $10.

I think Gridfinity is more geared toward people looking for a hobby than a practical storage solution. Which it totally fine - people are definitely creating some cool stuff with Gridfinity - but probably good to decide up front which group you fall into.

You'd be surprised how many ways there are to make storage containers. Gridfinity is one of them.

And I went straight to storing large numerical arrays, i.e. replacement for Zarr, NetCDF, HDF, etc

> People spend a lot of time printing generic bins and baseplates that would be better spent just printing custom bins

3D printing with a modern printer is set and forget. You send the print file to the printer and you go get it a couple hours later.

Still faster than waiting for a package from Amazon and lower resource usage than driving to the store.

The customization comes everywhere from picking the bin you want to selecting the color filament to match your layout. Gridfinity isn’t my thing but people who are into it are usually customizing something, from the color to the baseplate.

Time has never really been an issue imo. For the average person your printer sits unused 99% of the time if it takes you half a day to print a baseplate and some bins, who cares. It’s still faster and cheaper than shipping.

Commercializing doesn't really make sense. So I need to get a small 1x1x3 container to store washers or whatever. With my 3D printer, I'll have that container in under an hour. Even if I bought it with the fastest shipping Amazon has available, assuming it was from a local Warehouse, the earliest I could get it would be half a day away. Having a local store that sells them would be marginally faster, but then I have to go to the store, pick it up and come home. The hour I spend waiting for the printer isn't an hour. I'm I'm completely blocked from doing anything else. It's just an hour in which my printers busy.

I think they're a good intro to 3D printing.

You wouldn't download "Hello world"?

You can use this custom gridfinity generator.

https://gridfinity.perplexinglabs.com/

Ironically printing custom pelican inserts with this right now

I don't understand the sibling posts that're arguing with you.

Consumer-grade containers would be cheaper than 3d printing if buying a set, it'd get folk up-and-running without fuss, and when they wanted to customize it they could do so with the help of any of their 3d printing fanatic buddies.

So yeah. I agree with @stephenpetryk. Storage solution companies should start marking their bins as Gridfinity-compatible (which is a protected use of copyright regardless of whether "Gridfinity" is copyrighted).

Especially for baseplates, since I have some drawers that are larger than my print area. It'd be awesome to just buy an injection molded 8x7 on Amazon or whatever for $5 instead of fiddling with glue and interlocking puzzle pieces.

I guess selling injection molded parts is forbidden under its licensing terms, which seems unfortunate.

Let people make some money while everyone is saving money.

I've printed a ton of little compartments for all manner of things for crafts. I'll print the grid to lay flat in a drawer, and then print various size boxes which socket into that grid. I'll also print a grid to lay on the table, so there is never a need to pull parts from the drawers, just pull the whole box and it sockets onto the table with it's own dedicated space and no slippage.

There is also a plugin for Fusion 360 which allows customizing a lot of items that can go into the grid.

I do work on my shop, but only so far as it furthers my hobbies.

As far as gridfinity goes, it's really nice to have the right size and amount of storage for everything. Imagine those inserts people buy for cutlery for a drawer in the kitchen. There is always a gap on the side for something to fall into. There is only a slot for all knives. No place at all for corn on the cob holders.

Now imagine this same problem for building models where a person may have 200+ different items in different amounts. Previously people used things like tackle boxes from fishing, or one of those plastic cases for holding screws. But they never quite line up.

Also, 3d printing is very much an asynchronous kind of thing. You work on your shop by pushing a button and get results an hour later. It's not woodworking where you spend 80 hours building your bench, then the next 500 hours building all the parts for it.

YMMV but when my work area changed from "big pile of junk" to "semi-organized", it removed a lot of the friction I had for just starting projects. I need a tape measure? I know exactly where one is, it has a dedicated 3D printed holder on my pegboard which lets me get to work instead of spending 15 minutes digging through drawers and shelves.

Everything has a place, and when it’s in its place, I can find it quickly and get to work. These systems help me with that.

One video which discusses usage for tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYA0xLryF-g

to each their own. if you do 1 small project per year, it might make sense to dig for 30 minutes in home depot bucket to find out you don't actually have the part you thought you have. doing that more frequently starts to become major waste of time. my tools don't live in gridfinity boxes, shallow tool drawers are good enough, but metric bolts, nuts and other stuff is neatly organised.

If you just need an outline, this nascent AI site tries to address that need:

https://www.tooltrace.ai/

(and for the Europeans/Rest of the World, there's an A4 configuration option)

Imho thats overoptimizing. To me the next larger square box is the best most flexible solution. I get the allure of perfect fit places for everything but to me its not worth the continuous effort. (I got several gridfinity drawers)

The common approach is to take a photo of an object from above together with a ruler or something of a known size for scale, then import that directly into the CAD software, scale according to the scaling object, and create a cutout along the object's outline. No need for calipers, 3d scans, or other complex measurement procedures. There are a lot of videos and guides on how to do that.

You could get a table mat with a measuring grid and take photographs of the object from different sides; three or more depending on how much asymmetric features the object has. Go as far away from the object as possible and use maximum zoom to get as close to isometric perspective as possible. If it’s not a very thick object, this method is millimeter accurate. With larger objects, the perspective will lead to slightly larger measurements at the object extremities: edges closest to the camera will be enlarged.

Then, in your CAD program, set up the photos as backgrounds for different perspective views.

Or, obviously, get a 3D scanner and live with the point cloud mesh approximations, it’s probably less of a hassle.

Or… just get a good set of calipers and a radius measuring tool.

I don’t recall the specifics at the moment but YouTuber Uncle Jessy showed how to take a custom box in his gridfinity video.

https://youtu.be/TvIvoY013xQ

I'm sure your colleague has done this already, but for anyone considering creating their own models, I would highly recommend checking whether somebody else already went through that process for you. A lot of things have been fitted into gridfinity. And even if not for gridfinity specifically, you can fairly easily adapt other existing models to a gridfinity based box.

There are 3d model search engines where I recommend just entering [item name] + gridfinity to find pre existing models. There is: yeggi.com and thangs.com (be aware that the latter recently changed to only display models from its own domain by default).

I just pull out calipers, take some quick measurements, then put them into OpenSCAD, export, and hit print.

Between Honeycomb Storage Wall and Gridfinity almost every tool I own has a home.

Photogrammetry is one. Generally results in messy geometry though and tolerances get finicky.

The CAD plugin in Blender is my favorite though. Need a caliper to get measurements and then I can build out my hooks/clamps/whatever. FreeCAD for when I just need sketches as I find the solid part workflow utterly confusing, whereas I'm very well versed in Blender.

https://outline.georgs.lv

I do the following:

1. Draw the outline of the tool in question on A4 paper

2. Scan it

3. Trace it on Blender, extrude, boolean

4. Print

Of course, only works for small enough tools. Maybe use more A4 sheets?

I scanned a small tool, a drill is probably more difficult

Well if you want to get dirty and not deal with design, build a vacuum former. Shop vac, perf board, 2x4 or 1x2 frame and whatever rigid for a backer. Build the frames out of screen door frame pieces, and binder clips to close them. Polystyrene sheets are cheap af $.05 or less at any plastic supplier. Never been to a plastic supplier? I guarantee theres one relatively near by in whatever is your closest major city. Use your oven to heat the plastic. Turn on the vac, pull out the plastic when it droops, slam down quick… perfect part. Lots of videos on youtube. Adam savage does a few on the process. Lots of nuance to the process to get really good pieces but for cheap, quick and good its hard to beat. Oh yeah the whole stormtrooper cosplay scene has done a lot of work on the setup, most definitely lots of improvements that I’m glossing over but like all rabbit holes its pretty deep.

Adam Savage’s guide to vacuum forming https://youtube.com/watch?v=lTy8tsZzT_Q&pp=ygUaYWRhbSBzYXZhZ...

First page I could find for the diy stormtrooper costume process https://www.studiocreations.com/howto/stormtrooper/index.htm...

I must have a very indifferent attitude towards catnip then.

I've also sought treatment for OCD. It doesn't give me any kind of "organizing superpower", it just makes we want to wash my hands after touching things.

sighs in stalled project and half organised gridfinity cupboard

Though the plus side to this is that it can be done somewhat inrementally