I buy a lot of stuff from the internet so I have a lot of cardboard, and I’m currently testing and sorting a lot of 18650 batteries for another project and I need bins to organize myself correctly.

I’m in an association that has a laser cutter (and I’m planning to buy one) so the goal of my project is to make a CAD file where I enter parameters such as: height, width, depth and it makes a file used by the laser cutting software and it makes me my foldable cardboard.

The first difficulty was to find the CAD software that lets me do it. I’ve previously only used Fusion 360 but the parametric functionality that lets me use variables is not in the free version and paying €1200 per year just for this is not in my plan. I searched a bit and FreeCAD has this functionality.

After following some YouTube tutorials I was able to use this functionality to make my cuttable template (but at this point I still didn’t know how to make 3D models).
In the end it gives me something like this (I’ve put some lines in red to differentiate cutting and folding):

Then to learn how to do 3D modeling a friend told me to try to replicate a model I’d already done on Fusion360, and 2 hours later I managed to understand how to make it in FreeCAD. This is a parametric tube fixation:

So after more hours I made a previsualization model of a bin using the same parameters as the 2D cutting lines.