AA Cell Battery Box with Snap Lid, 1x AA to 4x AA Sizes

thingiverse

These battery boxes are designed with the intention that you will incorporate them directly into your project's 3D design, or you can simply cut a hole in your project and glue them in. Each box is made of three parts: the box itself, the lid section, and the catch which gets glued onto the lid. The catch is a separate piece because it needs to be printed "side on" so that the filament lies along its profile, otherwise it would just snap along the layers when used. Be sure to print the box with support touching the build plate only, printing support in the tab or catch receptacle would be hard to remove. Each box has a 5mm lip around the edge (actually 7mm but the inside 2mm is a fillet for strength) if you want to cut or design a hole and just glue in a separately printed box to your project. I used CA glue (superglue) to glue the catch to the lid, works just fine. Note that I printed these boxes in PLA. The positive and negative terminals I used are from http://sparks.gogo.co.nz/AA_-18650-etc-Battery-Cell-Terminal-Pair-528.html but you can probably get them elsewhere too. They have a backplate which is 13.5mm wide and 11.5mm high (not including the leg), the spring is about 10.3mm extended (measured from back of backplate) and 3mm compressed fully. These terminals simply press into the provided slots. Naturally you can put the terminals in any way you wish, series, parallel, whatever, the positioning and wiring of the terminals is your business. The catch and lid retain the cells very strongly, I could not shake them out. After printing the three components, attach the catch to the lid by putting a drop of CA glue (cyanoacrylate / superglue) on the underside of the lid where you will see a small indentation that the catch is to be attached to. Clamp the catch on until the CA sets. You may find that the first time the catch isn't well glued, so just add a fresh dot of glue and try again. This design was created in OnShape and can be viewed or copied here: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/be6d5f907bc0e83693f00d8c/w/96e1eeaa962fd97433430fbb/e/0ab6ed65229181bc63db04a0 I made these boxes in a somewhat parametric way so I can easily customize them for cylindrical cells sized from about 14mm up to about 20mm diameters, currently I have generated the following: AA (aka 14500) 1x to 4x 18650 1x to 4x AAA 1x to 4x