Sometimes, as hackers and makers, we can end up with messy lashed-together gear that is neither reliable nor tidy. Rackmounting your stuff can be a great way to improve the robustness and liveability of your setup. If you find this appealing, you might like CageMaker by [WebMaka].
This parametric OpenSCAD script can generate mounts for all kinds of stuff. Maybe you have a little network switch that’s just a tangle of wires on your desk, or a few pieces of audio gear that are loosely stacked on top of each other and looking rather unkempt. It would be trivial with this tool to create some 3D printed adapters to get all that stuff laced up nice and neat in a rack instead.
If you’re eager to get tinkering, you can try out the browser-based version quite easily. We’ve featured similar work before, too—many a maker has trod the path of rackmounting, as it turns out.
Being an OpenSCAD bigot myself, I tried it out briefly and my observation was that whilst it seems extraordinarily capable, it doesn’t seem to have a notion of Rack Units (1 RU = 1.75″) which is the standard rack height dimension.
Well I didn’t see such a thing under the Rack Geometry customiser or Device Height, only a whatever-you-like metric height value. I searched the code and no ‘rack unit’ or variations thereof. Also it seems pure metric which is ok for me but there are some countries in the world whose residents that may not feel quite as enamoured.
A suggestion I can think of is that there are so many options available that a series of pairs of small screenshots as numbered Figs (and the customiser texts mentioning which Fig) showing the before/after effect of a setting would be useful, much like the OpenSCAD guide itself. The QuckStart Guide doesn’t give a lot of help but pushes you onto an ‘OpenSCAD Playground’ thing which I didn’t bother checking out.