3D Printed Enclosure Calculator

The engine treats the entire enclosure shell — walls plus the lid slab — as 100% solid PLA, because a thin printed wall has no meaningful interior region for infill to fill. Infill density only matters for thick solid sections of a print, and this enclosure model doesn't generate any, so the field is collected for future use but never enters the math. If you want a lighter, faster print in your slicer, dropping infill there won't hurt this shell-dominated geometry much anyway, since it's already close to fully solid.

This calculator assumes the entire shell — all four walls, floor, and a full lid slab at your wall thickness — is solid plastic with no gaps, whereas a real slicer applies perimeter counts and top/bottom layer settings that can be thinner or thicker than a flat wall-thickness assumption, and it accounts for infill patterns in truly thick regions. It also skips supports, brims, and any snap-fit bosses or screw posts you add in CAD, all of which change material use in ways this simplified box model can't see.

It adds a fixed 1.5mm gap on every side of the PCB footprint and above the tallest component before it ever applies wall thickness, since a board wedged tight against the inside of a printed enclosure won't fit once print tolerances and any conformal coating or connector overhang are accounted for. That clearance is fixed at 1.5mm and isn't one of the inputs you can adjust, so if your components have taller connectors than expected, increase the Tallest Component value directly rather than expecting extra headroom elsewhere.

Print time is simply the shell's volume in cm³ divided by a flat 15 cm³/hour, a rate chosen to be conservative for detailed enclosures with lots of small perimeter moves rather than large open infill passes. It doesn't account for your specific printer's speed settings, layer height, or the extra time small features and corners add beyond a straight volumetric rate, so use it as a loose ballpark, not a slicer-accurate time-to-print.