We have designed and made our own boxes. Having acces to laser cutter equiment gives options. They were made at the fablab at UCL.

On a sidenode, this year we have schedule two trips to the fablab, should you be interested. See here.

The design is completely parametrized and most thing may be changed. Thickness, length, height and such all all calculated. We use openscad for this.

Flat version

popbox flat

(image is fuzzy, sorry)

We wanted something foldable, since they will be in storage for 50 weeks of the year.

I have added holes for zip ties, should we need to make it more robust. These will have to be cut on take down.

Front open

popbox no front

The holes for the rack mount is correct. The current version is 4U high.

Front attached

popbox with front

The hook makes it a sturdy design. The bottom fits in a slid in the sides and I added carrying handles.

It is a cool robust box.

Lid closed

popbox closed

I did a heat test over 12 hours with the Juniper EX4200 switch inside and the inside temperature rose to +5 degree compared to the room.

You can also hear that the sound dampening when closing the lid is very little - an indication that we have added enough holes.

Other comments:

  • I will put it on thingiverse and extract it from the regular NOC repo at some point.
  • Exif data was removed from the jpgs using exiftool. That reduced the size by 300 kB ?!
  • Gitlab has STL preview functionality. Very cool.
  • The design will be useful for making a box for half-sized rack equipment. Sound people apparently use that a lot.
  • We will paint them white and add BH logos and UCL fablab logo.
  • More (and better) images of actual use will appear as we build BH19. The box will be on a pallet with some plastic to protect it against the elements.