Inktober starts next month, and this year’s prompt list is out! Very excited to get started on this year’s topics.

After designing my first shelf in TinkerCAD, I wanted a project that actually needed a proper enclosure rather than a mounting bracket. I’d been building a small self-contained WiFi scanner around this cheap ESP32 dev board — an ESP32 module with a built-in 1.14 inch LCD — paired with a small rechargeable battery, and it had been living on my desk as a loose tangle of board, wires and cells. Time to give it a case.

Following on from designing my own shelves and stands for prints off the A1 Mini, I’ve finally sat down and learned some proper CAD rather than just cobbling shapes together — first project is TinkerCAD, and the thing I picked to design is a shelf to hold my Unifi WiFi router.

It’s a simple, practical brief for a first go: something to mount the router flat and tidy rather than leaving it balanced wherever it’ll fit. TinkerCAD’s block-based approach made it an easy on-ramp — nothing like the intimidation of opening a full parametric CAD package for the first time — and it was enough to get a properly measured, functional design done in an evening.