This is a very simple dispenser for AA batteries. It can hold 16 batteries, split between dead and charged. This was a pretty quick project and isn’t perfect, but I’ll share it here in case anyone else finds it useful.
04 September 2017: Converted text to outlines in battery_box.svg. Also uploaded another copy of the design with no text on the hopper faces as battery_box_no_text.svg. Thanks to @cynd11 for letting me know the font might be an issue for some.
04 September 2017: Moved files to GitHub, explicitly licensed design using Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 to be as permissive as possible.
This is great – thanks for sharing the files. I needed a place for my freebie HF batteries and liked your design as it keeps the CG low (I’ll be a lot less likely to knock this one over ). I had a some scrap d-board from another project, so whipped this version out. Press fit was spot-on!
Looking at the F360 file is the treasure in this one for me. So nicely done. It looks like you were going for full parametric and some little thing is not right? Most every line and extrusion is a multiple or quotient of battery length or diameter. I will be studying on this for some time like a Rosetta stone.
Most of the designs I make start out with the intention of being fully parametric, this one included. Then somewhere along the way I get lazy and start on the “that looks about right” school of design. I was primarily interested in using the diameter and length to make sure that I had the base of the dispenser appropriately scaled.
In this one, you’ll notice some oddities. The first one I made was only half as tall because I wasn’t really thinking clearly about how much volume was available in the hopper. I got a little lazy when I went to extend it and wound up just doubling the ramp faces and manually extending the back and sides to match.
Something like this is one of my first planned projects. We own a vacation rental home and the housekeeping company just keeps a few packs of laundry soap in a zip lock bag on top of the washer. So I’m planning on doing this same thing but to hold soap packets.
The one thing I’d do differently, and may someday get around to, is to make the base at the bottom angled forward at least a few degrees. As it is right now you sometimes have to shake it a little bit to get the batteries to get them to move forward so that you can grab them.
I had trouble opening the SVG file with my older copy of Illustrator (CS5). Maybe newer versions are better able to deal with it, but I got “The operation cannot complete because of an unknown error” message when I tried to open it directly.
So I opened the SVG in a text editor (TextWrangler) and changed the font designation from Tough Guy Stencil to MyriadPro-Regular. Then the file opened fine. Thought this might help someone else in a similar situation.
I made one too! I used “Used” and “New” because we have a bunch of partially used batteries that are not good enough for the guitar pickup but fine for calculators and such. Now I would just like to figure out how to extend the top and sides to make it somewhat taller; we’ve got a bunch of batteries! Wonder if it would be easier to do in Illustrator?
How many batteries are you thinking? No promises but I might make some tweaks to it soonish and it wouldn’t be hard to consider an embiggened version when I do that.