Over-Engineering a Custom Cardboard Box with Wolfram Alpha and Packing Algorithms

After building a simple dowel tree, I started thinking about the long-term life of this build. It would need to be stored for most of the year, and there were several dowels that needed to be kept together. In this video, I'll walk you through my thought process in designing and making (and re-making) a custom-sized cardboard box to hold these dowels. Along the way we'll take a quick look at Wolfram Alpha and the 2-D packing algorithms that helped me design the box.