Free forever · No account · No watermark
Crabinet
Every hermit crab needs a shell. So does every board out of a dead laptop.
When a laptop dies it is almost never the computer that died. It is the screen, the hinge, or the keyboard. The board is fine — it just has nowhere to live.
Size the box, choose which faces need to breathe, export the STL. 17 of the 20 presets are built on published form factors or real measurements, and the rest tell you to measure first. It all happens in your browser — no account, no upload, no export limit.
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Donate Computers UKBoth apertures matter: one end carries USB and Ethernet, the other the power and video connectors.
Cooling: A Pi 4 or 5 under emulation load will throttle in a sealed box. Keep the lid vented, or leave room for a fan.
Height: Fits a bare board with a low-profile heatsink. A stacked HAT wants 30mm+, an official PoE HAT more again.
Interior dimensions
The space the board gets. Walls are added outside these numbers.
Faces
All four modes export as real printable geometry, not a preview effect.
- Solid
- — A closed panel.
- Vented
- — Louvered slats with real airflow gaps.
- Aperture
- — A picture-frame border, middle fully open — for a port, a speaker or a heatsink.
- Open
- — Not printed at all.
Material and print cost
Tougher and more heat-tolerant than PLA. The sensible default for something with a warm board in it.
An estimate from panel volume × your infill factor × material density. Your slicer knows about walls, top and bottom layers and supports; this does not. Treat it as a sanity check against a quote, not a substitute for one.
Measured a board we haven’t got?
Presets are limited by somebody owning the board and a set of callipers, not by anything technical. If you have dialled this in for a board that is not in the list, copy it and send it over — it goes in with your name on the source line and everyone else gets it for free.
Or let us deal with it
If the board turns out to be dead, or you would rather not spend a weekend on it, we will take the whole machine off you. Free collection, data destroyed properly, and anything still working goes to a school or a charity instead of a landfill.
Donate it instead →What “free” means here
Most tools like this are free until the moment you want the file. Crabinet is not one of those, and here is that in specifics rather than adjectives.
- No account, ever
- Nothing to sign up for, no email, no "create a free account to export". Open the page and use it.
- Nothing is uploaded
- The geometry is generated in your browser and the STL is written on your own machine. Your design never reaches us, so there is nothing for us to store, sell or lose.
- No watermark, no export limit
- Every STL is the finished file. Not a preview, not a low-resolution teaser, and not three exports before a paywall.
- There is no paid tier
- Not a free plan alongside a paid one — there is no second plan. Nothing on this page is a trial of anything.
- Commercial use is fine
- Print them, sell them, put them in a product. We ask nothing back.
So how is it paid for?
We are a UK social enterprise. The work that funds us is collecting and disposing of business IT properly — certified data destruction, WEEE paperwork, and refurbishing what still works for schools and charities. This tool does all its work in your browser rather than on a server, so it costs us almost nothing to run however popular it gets. There is no commercial reason to put a paywall in front of it, so there is not one.
Turning it into an emulation machine
A rehoused board makes a good retro console because emulating older hardware asks very little of a modern-ish machine. The usual order of work:
- 1
Get the board out and test it first
Power it up on the bench before you print anything. There is no point sizing a case around a board that does not post.
- 2
Work out your cooling before your case
This is the step people skip. A board that lived in a metal chassis was using that chassis. Decide where the heat leaves before you choose which faces are solid.
- 3
Measure, then measure the connectors
The PCB is not the widest part. USB shells, barrel jacks and right-angle plugs all stand proud of the board edge, and they set the real footprint.
- 4
Pick the software
Batocera, Lakka and RetroPie are the established ready-made distributions — they boot straight to a console-style menu and handle controllers for you. All three are free.
- 5
Print, fit, and expect to reprint the lid
Almost everyone reprints one part. Print the base first, check the board sits, then commit to the lid.
On the games themselves
Emulators are legal. The games are a separate question: in the UK, downloading a ROM of a game you do not own is copyright infringement, and so is distributing console BIOS files. Plenty of people dump their own cartridges and discs, and there is a real catalogue of freely licensed and homebrew games for most systems. We are not going to link you to a ROM site.
If the board turns out to be dead after all, that is what the rest of this site is for. Send us the whole machine and we will strip it properly, or check how old it is first if you are not sure it is worth the effort.
Questions
- Is Crabinet really free, and what is the catch?
- There is no catch and no paid tier to upgrade to. We are a UK social enterprise funded by business IT disposal, not by this tool, so there is no commercial reason to put a paywall in front of it. No account, no watermark, no export limit, and commercial use is fine.
- Do I need to sign up or give you an email address?
- No. There is no account system. Nothing on the page asks who you are, and no design you make is sent to us — the geometry is generated in your browser and the STL file is written on your own machine.
- Will it stay free?
- Yes. It costs us almost nothing to run because it does all its work in your browser rather than on a server, so there is no usage bill that grows if it gets popular. The organisation is funded by IT disposal work, and this tool is not a revenue line.
- Is the exported STL watermarked or limited in any way?
- No. The export is a standard binary STL of the exact geometry shown in the preview, at full resolution, as many times as you like. The only thing embedded is a line in the file header saying which tool made it, which no slicer displays and no print is affected by.
- Can I use the designs commercially?
- Yes. Print them, sell the prints, or use them in a product. We ask nothing in return.
- What is it actually for?
- An enclosure for a computer that has outlived its case. When a laptop dies it is usually the screen, hinge or keyboard that has gone, not the board — so the board gets rehoused rather than scrapped. It works equally well for a bare Raspberry Pi, a mini PC board or a salvaged drive.
- Can I print the files on any 3D printer?
- The export is a standard binary STL, which every slicer accepts. Check the outer footprint against your bed before you start — the larger presets are bigger than a common 220mm bed.
- What if I do not own a 3D printer?
- Take the STL to a print bureau, or a local library or makerspace with a printer. The cost estimator on the page gives you a rough figure to sanity-check a quote against.
- Are the dimensions accurate?
- Presets based on published form factors — the Raspberry Pi Model B footprint, the ITX family, the 2.5in drive standard — are exact, because those sizes are specified. Presets for specific salvaged devices are marked as estimates and tell you to measure first. The tool says which is which before you export.
- Why is the floor open on some presets?
- Because on a fanless board the original metal chassis was the heatsink. Sealing that face inside a plastic box makes the board throttle within minutes, so those presets leave it open and say why.