Every coffee is a feature request
31 August 2026
The site has a coffee button, and once in a while somebody actually presses it. Three people so far. Two of them left a kind word, which honestly carries a slow afternoon further than the money does. The third one left a work order.
Great box generator, would be nice if you could add scoops to the sections to make it easier to get things out. Also, the dimensions should be the finished outside to make it easier. Instead, need to go back and edit those when it will not fit on a build plate, or an option to maximize based on printer. But great tool!!
Two exclamation marks and three feature requests, from someone who clearly printed a real box, filled it with real small parts, and then tried to fish them out with real fingers. You cannot buy user research like that. Well, apparently you can, it costs one coffee.
Scoops
The first ask was the easiest to picture. A compartment with vertical walls holds M3 screws perfectly and releases them never; you end up tweezing them out one by one or turning the whole box over. Gridfinity bins solved this years ago with a scoop, a rounded ramp at the front of each cell that your fingertip follows to sweep parts up and out.
The rugged box now has the same thing. Tick "Scoops" in the divider options and every cell gets a quarter-round ramp along its front edge, up to 10 mm of radius, never taller than the divider itself. It merges into the floor and the wall with no seams, prints without supports for the same reason a 45 degree overhang does, and in the cross-section preview you can see the little wave of ramps under the lid line.
The request behind the request
The second ask took more thought, because on paper the feature already existed. The generator has had an "Outer envelope" toggle since the beginning; flip it and your numbers describe the outside of the box. My first reaction was that the supporter just had not found the toggle, and I nearly filed the whole thing under better labeling.
Then I re-read the sentence. The pain was not inner versus outer. The pain was "when it will not fit on a build plate". A closed box that measures 240 mm still prints as a base, a lid and two clips lying side by side, and that layout is what has to fit your printer, not the box. Knowing the outer size does not tell you the plate size until the generator does the arithmetic. The person did the loop I have done myself a dozen times, generate, see the layout spill over, shrink, generate again.
So the fix went after the loop, not the label. You now pick your build plate in the output panel, with presets for the common beds (256 for the Bambu X1 and P1, 250 by 210 for the Prusa MK4, 220 for the Ender 3, 180 for the A1 mini) or any custom size. From then on the stats line that shows the printed footprint turns red the moment the parts outgrow your plate, while you are still dragging the slider, not after a failed export.
The Max button
The third ask was my favorite, because it inverts the whole workflow. Instead of "will this fit", the question becomes "how big can I go". The new Max size button takes your plate size and grows the box until the printed parts fill it, keeping the proportions you already set. In testing I gave it a 260 by 244 mm layout on a 180 by 180 plate and one click brought it to 161 by 178 with a 2 percent safety margin. It works in the other direction too, which is the direction the supporter meant.
All three landed in version 1.250.0 the same day I read the message. The scoops took the longest, because the ramp has a curved profile and the box builds its geometry in horizontal slices, so the arc had to be cut into the slice stack instead of just drawn once.
There is a lesson in the middle request that I keep relearning. People describe solutions, and the job is to find the problem underneath, because the problem is always more interesting. "Dimensions should be outside" sounded like a toggle I already had. "I keep regenerating until it fits my printer" was a missing feature, and a good one.
Whoever you are, the coffee bought about six hours of my Sunday and I would call it underpriced. The report button on any generator reaches me for free, and as of this week there is proof it gets things built.