(designed by golnik on Printables)
I found a cool Mario Question Block Switch game holder by golnik on Printables as a present to print out. It was very satisfying to snap the question mark panels into the cube and I wanted one for myself, but unfortunately I have only one switch game. I do however have 8 gameboy games and love making unnecessarily large prints that would barely make a profit if I tried to sell them!
I chose to make the walls of my game holder look like the bottom half of a GameBoy Advance SP, which was the first game console I ever had. The panels would be the buttons which snap into the cube like the question mark did with the Switch game holder. I used an image of the lower half of a GameBoy for reference and created the sketch in FreeCAD by looking at the proportions of the GameBoy image on another monitor.
In a new Part and Body object to create the cube, I created another sketch by using the panel sketch as a reference. This sketch would be the cutouts in the cube for the buttons panel to snap into place. In general I make tolerances of parts that fit together to be 0.4mm to match the diameter of my Prusa MK4S printer nozzle. I chose not to include the text A, B, Start, or Select on the design because it would be difficult to make these features appear well on this small of a scale, even though the box itself would be large.
Next I had to create the insert that would hold the gameboy games. This would be a friction fit piece like in golnik’s model and is pretty much a permanent part of the finished product. It could be removed with pliers but this would be very difficult and likely damage the print.
I started by measuring a gameboy game cartridge with calipers and making a rough model with slightly larger dimensions for built-in tolerancing. I decided to have the box hold 15 games so I duplicated the part into 5 rows of 3.
I used this group of toleranced rough cartridge models as a negative to perform a boolean cut into the actual game holding structure. This game holding structure is what will friction fit into the cube after the button inserts have been pushed in.
A boolean cut uses the space of the cartridge 3D models that intersect with the space of the game holding structure to create empty space. Because the empty space included a tolerance, it will hold the gameboy games with some wiggle room so they are not stuck into the spaces in the same way that the game holding structure would be stuck into the cube.
Finally, I created a lid for the box. The lid does not have a friction fit, but indents were added to give an easy way to remove it.
Next, I printed all 7 parts individually on my Prusa MK4S. In total, the parts used 693.04 grams of filament between colors.
