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iPad Mini CAD Files, Case Design Guidelines and More Available on Apple's Developer Site

By Rain Noe - October 25, 2012

in Tech

While some of you will be waiting on line to buy the iPad Mini, a portion of our readership will of course be designing cases for the device, whether for business or pleasure. Apple's now made the CAD files ready for public download, for those of you who'd like to warm up the MakerBot in advance of launch day.

On the "Designing Cases" section of Apple's Developer site, by the way, they've got no less than 45 CAD files available, including every generation of the iPad and iPhone alongside old-school iPods. Weird to think there was a time when that latter device was 19mm thick. There are also downloadable guidelines for designing cases as well as a neat "Flash Test Target" you can print out. The idea is that you slap your case on and take a photo of the target with your iDevice to be sure your design isn't interfering with the flash.

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michael

12 years ago

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this article is pretty misleading....i wasted about 30 minutes looking around for the mentioned "cad" files.
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Fabio

12 years ago

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Addition to damien: It's true concerning the corners: They're nog just rounded corners. Those things are formed by some complex B-splines. I don't know any further details.

If you want to approximate these B-spline corner fairly accurately: look at the size of app icons. Those things are more or less in-tune with the rounded corners.
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bob

12 years ago

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I agree with Eric. Not enough info. And these are NOT cad files, they are PDF's.
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Damien

12 years ago

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Yeah, there are a few details that would've been nice to have. Especially since the curves in the blueprints aren't clean. To your complaint about radii- no contemporary Apple products have true corner radii. They're blends.
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Eric

12 years ago

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Utterly useless information!!! Not in a single of any of the drawings does it really provide any information manufacturing information, such as corner radius information or edge radius or bevel angles?...utterly stupid, how can you design a good fitting case and manufacture it if you have to guess at that stuff?!
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