Lego-like box prototype

	Bob wants to use his laser cutter to cut and etch flat pieces of material to make large Lego-like blocks. These pictures show a 8"x4"x2" block he built from cardboard. The blocks are great, very solid, but the folding is very complex, the design does not scale to other dimensions (e.g., a longer or fatter block), and the nib placement does not generalize easily.
	Yesterday, I bought a new pair of tennis shoes. The shoes came in a very solid box, built from a single piece of cardboard. The folding was rather complex, and the box had a lid which did not latch. But it got me thinking about the Lego box problem.
	Today, I looked around my office and noticed the box from my Acer netbook. It unfolded as shown at right, much simpler than the Wilson box, and the lid latched in place.
	I made a drawing of the unfolded box, with dimensions noted. The design scales easily to any size. The material required to build a box of size wxhxd is 2h+3d+f by w+4d, where f is the height of the flap at the top.
	I decided to build a box from card stock (an 8.5"x11" manila file folder). I chose box dimensions 6"x2"x1", requiring a 7"x10" piece of stock. Here is the stock before and after cutting.
	And here's the assembled box, quite sturdy. I forgot to include the flap, unfortunately. And I should have squared off the interlocking flaps, since I was cutting by hand, but I approximated the rounded flaps from the Acer box instead.
	Next: nibs. I decided to try building a simple cubic nib from material in the top, using two separate cutouts so that a solid row of material remains below the nib. Here are my first crude hand-drawn attempts. It works, but the design could definitely stand some improvement. Whether these nibs are strong enough certainly is not clear yet.
	Here's the nib design transferred to the card stock box, then cut out. Later, looking at Bob's cardboard prototype above, I realized I should have just cut X's across the holes in the base rather than removing the square entirely, but since I'm unlikely to build another prototype by hand, these holes are purely pro forma.
	The final result, partially assembled. My hand cutting of the quarter-inch nib squares was insufficently precise, and the card stock is not very durable, so folding up the tiny nibs was a bit of a nightmare. Better precision and more nib experimentation would help. But it's a start, and the design does scale easily to any size block and any nib placement.