Customizable Brackets

Customizable Brackets

A collection of corner, flat angled, flat straight, and U-shaped brackets
with configurable angles and hole patterns.

Used by my muffin fan holder and mini greenhouse projects (see pictures).

Updates

Version 2, nov-29-2023:

• Add capability to specify corner-style brackets side lengths separately
  and u-shaped brackets base and arm lengths separately. Note this
  modification required changing the customizable brkts_bracket_length
  parameter from a scalar to a 2D array. Please update your brackets.json
  file accordingly.

• Add capability to specify which sides of brackets have holes for mounting
  screws.

• The brackets thing longer includes files from the BOSL2 library. BOSL2
  can be downloaded from github (see below).

Notes

• The top level OpenSCAD file is brackets.scad. This is the file you open
  when starting OpenSCAD or the file that you pass to OpenSCAD on the
  command line.

• Alternatively, if you're having trouble opening brackets.scad, try
  opening the file called brackets-1f.scad. This is a flat file - all of
  the necessary files except the BOSL2 library files are concatenated into
  this single file.

• The OpenSCAD files use the BOSL2 library, not included here, but can be
  downloaded from https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2. Be sure to add the
  path to your BOSL2 directory to OPENSCADPATH. For example, on Linux, do
  something like:

  export OPENSCADPATH=$OPENSCADPATH:/mnt/share/openscad-contrib

  Where the openscad-contrib subdirectory contains the BOSL2 hierarchy.

Customizable Parameter Notes

Bracket length (default = [60, 0]) - A 2D array which is
[side1-len, side2-len] for corner brackets and [base-len, arms-len] for
u-brackets. If brkts_bracket_length[1] is 0, then all bracket sides have
length = brkts_bracket_length[0].

Interior angle (default = 90 degrees) - this is the corner bracket angle
which is typically 90deg. A smaller angle opens the sides up relative to
each other.

Bend angle (default = 0 degrees) - applies to the flat angled brackets
only. Bends one side up or down from a flat surface. Can be used, for
example, to join a flat piece and an angled piece on the top or bottom.

Mounting hole (shaft) diameter, head diameter, head height - default to the
dimensions for an #6 wood screw.

Hole count (default = 2) - number of holes per side.

Holes out (default = false) - flips the beveled screw head cutout to the
opposite side of the brackets.

Hole skew (default = 0) - skews adjacent holes relative to each other in
the Y direction.

Drill sides (default = "all") - Which sides of bracket to drill holes.
"all" = all sides, "s1" = corner brackets side1, "s2" = corner brackets
side2, "base" = u-bracket base, "arms" = u-bracket vertical arms, and
"none" = no holes.

Greenhouse Notes

The top angled part of the mini greenhouse is 3' wide and 1' tall in the
back, so the angle in the front is atan(1/3) ~= 18.5 degrees, making the
angle bracket internal angles 90 - 18.5 = 71.5 and 90 + 18.5 = 108.5
degrees.

See the upside down picture of the greenhouse frame to see how the brackets
were used to support the frame.

The angled flat surface bracket was used as additional support on the front
greenhouse sides. It's internal angle is 71.5 degrees.

Included STLs

I've only included the STLs that I used for the mini greenhouse project.
For other configurations, you'll need to use the OpenSCAD customizer (see
below)

Customizer Notes

The Thingiverse customizer does not work with this thing. The Thingiverse
customizer seems to be stuck at [2015, 3, 0] (the last time I checked
anyway) and this thing uses some of the more modern OpenSCAD features.

To customize, download all of the thing .scad files into a folder,
download the BOSL2 library, then open brackets.scad with OpenSCAD.
OpenSCAD is downloadable from openscad.org.

Licenses and Attributions

brackets.scad, et. al: LGPL v2

BOSL2: BSD 2-Clause License Copyright (c) 2017-2019, Revar Desmera