Try out my alpha software project - Easy cabinet design tool

[sansbury]

I'd like to introduce a project I've been working on for a little while, which is a new software tool designed to make designing and fabricating simple cabinets much easier for the DIYer and individual tradesman. It's still far from complete in terms of what I have in mind, but there's enough there that I think it's worth throwing it out to get some unfiltered feedback

Make Me a Cabinet

Browser-based cabinet design tool

www.makemeacabinet.com

Over the past year since finishing the construction of my shop building and getting back into woodworking, I've found myself frequently banging my head against a wall when it came to designing simple cabinet boxes intended for assembly with Domino tenons. Working out all the dimensions and locations for domino tenons, working out drawer boxes and mounting holes, and so on is tedious and easy to goof up. Doing everything in generic CAD isn't necessarily easier, even though I'm pretty proficient in tools like Fusion and Solidworks. There's some amazing software tools out there designed for big production CNC shops, but they're not really well-suited to smaller-scale users.

Since my professional career over the past 25+ years has been in the software industry, I decided to try building the tool I wish I had. The vision here is that in a few minutes you can put in your basic carcass dimensions, configure dividers, shelves, and drawer boxes, and get everything you need laid out with dimensioned panel and joinery details as well as a cutting plan to break down your sheets efficiently. There's no login needed, no app to download, it all runs in the browser. It can work on a smartphone, but I haven't done mobile optimization yet, so it's much easier to use on a tablet or larger screen.

Currently, it supports generating frameless drawer fronts, and works best with undermount drawer slides. Face frame support is on the to-do list, and I plan to ship with a decent selection of drawer slide options built in so you can choose one you like. I haven't gotten to implementing doors yet, but that's getting closer to the top of the to-do list. Material choices are also limited, basically 18mm ply for the structure, 12mm for drawer boxes, 6mm for backs and drawer floors, but those will expand steadily as I progress so expect to see more choices soon.

It's also only in metric right now, but will support imperial in the future.

On the flip side, and the reason why I'm sharing in this group first, is that I've built in a number of features specifically around parts of the Festool system. Domino tenon placements are calculated automatically, including the use of tight/loose mortises, and are designed to maximize use of the built-in indexing stops and 10mm offsets to make setup and layout as efficient as possible. You can also enable balanced panel sizing so that the app will help make sure 32mm hole patterns are easy to bore with the LR32 fixture system.

Anyway, that's the basic idea. There's a TON of detail and depth in the choices behind this and the ways you can use it, but I've already written a ton. In my experience, the best tools are those that just make sense, and while I have a lot more work to do, my goal is for this to be usable without requiring a manual or tutorial video.

Interested (and slightly nervous ) to see what y'all think.

 

[sansbury]

ALSO: just to get in front in case anyone is wondering, yes, eventually I plan to have user accounts to do things like save designs and preferences, and maybe down the road there will be some advanced features that require $ to access. However, my vision is for there to always be a good free/no-login-needed version of the tool along the lines of what you see here.

I'm fortunate in that I don't need this to pay my rent, and I see this in large part as a way of giving something of value back as a way of saying thanks for all the great free and open resources I've had over the years. Supporting a basic version of this would cost very little, and I don't have shareholders to answer to, so my hope is to create something great for the community and if I'm lucky, maybe offset my own tool and materials budget a little along the way.

 

[MacBoy]

Mighty nifty — congratulations on opening your kimono!

I smiled when reducing the height of the drawer to 200mm resulted in a nice nightstand in 3D mode.

Then added evenly spaced shelves put a shelf directly on top of the drawer — effectively doing the right thing.

Can we do an entertainment center, for example?

 

[sansbury]

I smiled when reducing the height of the drawer to 200mm resulted in a nice nightstand in 3D mode.

Then added evenly spaced shelves put a shelf directly on top of the drawer — effectively doing the right thing.

"Doing the right thing" is something I've put a lot of thought into with this. You may have been the first "real user" so I'm glad it worked!

Can we do an entertainment center, for example?

Do you have 30 seconds?



Things like ways of doing toe kicks, intermediate supports, etc. are somewhere in my mental roadmap for this.

 

[sansbury]

I've fixed a bunch of bugs and added a number of features, including adding domino joints to drawer boxes, improving panel optimization and dimension display, and adding a brief guided tour to point out the main features. Undermount runners are also displaying now, so you can see how they fit in. One neat detail is that if you mix floating shelves (which generate a 32mm hole pattern) with drawers, it will automatically locate the drawer against a pre-existing hole and calculate the box size and face panel to fit that. There is a small display bug in the front view which you might pick out below, but the plan views are correctly generated so it's *usable*.

Also, while a mobile phone isn't the best way to use it, it is sort of usable now, particularly for simpler box-only designs. The main problem is you can't zoom, so dimensions are a bit hard to read. I will have to do some more work on that at a future point. Right now, my main focus is on getting support for generating doors and hinge mountings, which I think I'll have working later this week.

 

[nclemmons]

Nicely done!

 

[sansbury]

Thanks! This is something I've wanted to build for close to 15 years actually and it's really fun to see it starting to work.

I'm getting ready to push an update tomorrow that will add support for doors using concealed hinges. The hard parts are all working but the UI flow for it could stand a bit more work to make it really nice. After that I'll be moving on to generating PDFs of the plan views. I'm excited for that because I think it's going to come out really sharp and be great for printing or just viewing the PDF in the shop. With that I'll be kind of finished with the initial feature set and work on polishing it up more for final release/launch.

 

[denovo]

This is great! Are there plans to add the ability to save multiple cabinets (for a kitchen for example) and then generate a master cut list optimized over several sheets of plywood?

 

[sansbury]

Let me say “sort of”

The optimization problem is very easy. The optimizer simply takes a list of panels and optimizes them, so it could easily combine multiple builds. It also has capability for varied sheet sizes under the hood so in the future you’ll be able to give it a list of partial sheets and it will use them up.

The ability to save cabinets is in there now, though a little undercooked. Thus far my focus has been on getting the core construction engine and drawings right, because those are the hard parts. The application support features are much easier, but do require some effort nonetheless.

What I don’t have yet is the ability to assemble multiple completed cabinet models together into a single view. If all you wanted was to design each box individually and then panelize them in one batch, that I could probably do in a day. It’s a good idea—on the list.

As it happens, I likely need to replace a gang of lower cabinets in my kitchen at some point this year. The previous owners redid the kitchen around 15 years ago, and while they made some good choices, this one corner clearly shows where the budget started to run out. Anyway, I’d been contemplating building the replacement myself, so I’ve been thinking about what this tool would need to support that project well.

Nonetheless, there’s always a fundamental tension between ease of use and feature richness. In some ways the tool as it is now has already become more complex and powerful and not as easy to use as my original vision, so I’m thinking about ways to create different UX/UI “tracks” that segment users so I can give each one the right amount of “stuff.” For instance, I could give a user a small selection of basic types like bookshelf, chest of drawers, and so on, and then they would only have to choose the dimensions and number of shelves/drawers. Of course you could always switch to power user mode and customize it all the way.

Anyway, where I am now is trying to nail down exactly what’s needed in terms of features, testing, documentation etc to be ready to publicize it a little more aggressively. I don’t think there’s any one big thing but a great many little ones.

Thanks for the ideas!

 

[P_K]

Certainly easier to learn than CV or Mozaik