Explore possibility of having the peg holes in both directions

[furll]

As all the rails have their peg holes either left/right or up/down this could lead to a slightly frustrating experience when someone like myself found out later they rotated one or two.

In addition, someone like myself may want to design some simple stuff to connect with Homeracker, and run into these issues as well.
At the moment I'm working on a simple holder for 3mm board/plywood and have a few issues with orientation and side of the holder for the board. This is amplified with the inaccuracies of board cutting (laser?) and the potentially confusing way of measuring shelves.

This all to ask if you may think if there's a way to maintain the structural integrity and ease of printing, but have the peg holes in both directions?

I'm sure you had this thought during design too and I am curious :)

P.S. board holder that may help indicate my issue

[kellervater]

Indeed I thought of that as well.
There are 2 challenges to this as you've already outlined:

• Structural Integrity -> this is more of a trial-and-error thing which just needs some tests if it would work or not
• Printing-Orientation -> this is the major challenge. The current design is meant to be printed with the holes oriented vertically. This enables a stable printing surface as well as a precise print of the convex shape of the holes to reliably hold the lock pins in place. This wouldn't be as accurate when it's being printet horizontally. Here, one can think of printing it similarly to the connectors in a diagonal manor which might circumvent this issue.

In the end, the decision to go uni-directional with the holes was based on simplicity.
It's easy to print, definitely the most stable variant and there haven't been any construction challenges (yet), which REALLY required me to go there. I was able to design all extensions so this requirement always fell short.
But I agree, that it would make life easier having holes in 2 dimensions here.

About your specific points:

As all the rails have their peg holes either left/right or up/down this could lead to a slightly frustrating experience when someone like myself found out later they rotated one or two.

Yup, also had that already. It is frustrating but also a learning experience which shouldn't happen too often when creating more and more things with it.

At the moment I'm working on a simple holder for 3mm board/plywood and have a few issues with orientation and side of the holder for the board. This is amplified with the inaccuracies of board cutting (laser?) and the potentially confusing way of measuring shelves.

I think this is solvable without having to have 2 directional holes. You could rather "sleeve" the underlying support from 3 sides (similar to the depth supports of the homeracker shelves:

This would also eliminate the leverage on the lock pins as shown on your screenshot and turn it into a sheer force which they are actually designed for.
If you then print them upright, you also have an ideal force transmission from the plywood enclosure to the support, as the printing lines then run perpendicular to the applied force.

Does that make sense to you?

[kellervater]

Implemented 🚀
https://makerworld.com/en/models/1317298-homeracker-core#profileId-1352703
Also to be found in the latest scad releases here in the repo.