CutCAD is a tool to design 3D shapes from 2D faces that can be cut on the lasercutter. Based on the specified material thickness and the relative angle between the faces, it will automatically create finger-joints such that the result will have a smooth surface. It is a great tool to make boxes around your electronics projects, but supports any type of shape that can be constructed from 2D faces.

CutCAD is the result of our work for the Media Computing Project 2014 at the Media Computing Group from RWTH Aachen University

Original project website:
https://hci.rwth-aachen.de/cutcad

• F. Heller, J. Thar, D. Lewandowski, M. Hartmann, P. Schoonbrood, S. Stoenner, S. Voelker, and J. Borchers, “CutCAD – An Open-Source Tool to Design 3D Objects in 2D,” in Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, New York, NY, USA, 2018.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{heller2018b,
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  author = {Florian Heller and Jan Thar and Dennis Lewandowski and Mirko Hartmann and Pierre Schoonbrood and Sophy Stoenner and Simon Voelker and Jan Borchers},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems},
  document_type = {inproceedings},
  doi = {10.1145/3196709.3196800},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-5198-0/18/06},
  keywords = {3D; physical prototyping; rapid prototyping; laser cutting; education; maker; fablab.},
  location = {Hong Kong},
  major = {1},
  publisher = {ACM},
  series = {DIS '18},
  timestamp = {2018},
  title = {CutCAD - An Open-Source Tool to Design 3D Objects in 2D},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196800},
  year = {2018},
  bdsk-url-1 = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196800}}