The third step in designing your own home automation system is to design a custom case for your product. This was a really costly process in the past, as you needed to find a manufacturer for your product and generally produce several thousands of units to have a good price for each unit produced.

Fortunately, 3D printing changed all that. We can now prototype individual systems at a very low cost using this technology. In this section, we are going to see how to make the 3D design of a simple case for our Arduino system. We are also going to see how to send it to a manufacturer so that it can be 3D printed.

And to do so, we are going to use software called OpenSCAD. This is an open source design software where you can actually write code to make your designs. This is perfect if you are not a designer but more of a coder, and it also allows you to make parametric designs that can easily be modified and shared. You can download...