Fast And Compact Battery Organizer (AA/AAA/18650/14500)

Design

The walls are all continuous and curved with no sharp corners. This minimizes the amount of stopping the printer has to do so acceleration isn't a big issue. Because of this you should be able to print at a higher print speed than you normally would and still have good dimensional accuracy.

The cells are also laid out with “hexagonal packing” to save space (as any organization tool should!) and the walls between the cells are thin (0.8-1.2mm depending on the model you download). This makes the model smaller so you can store more batteries in less space than some of the other options I've seen around.

Printing

Model selection

There are several STL files available. The main differences are:

• Wall width
• Battery size
• number of batteries

Make sure that when you print your line width divides nicely into the wall width (e.g 0.4mm nozzle * 2 walls = 0.8mm wall width and 0.6mm nozzle * 2 walls = 1.2mm).

Settings

• Layer height: Any, but thicker is faster
• Infill: Any - this will print as a solid print anyway

FreeCAD Model

The FreeCAD model is included and should be fairly easy to customize by editing the spreadsheet. The only thing that's not really customizable is the number of rows (fixed at 3), but everything else should be straightforward.

Note: The model can take a bit of time to update, so if you're making several changes it's helpful to enable “skip recomputes” on the project, then manually recompute when you're done.