Plantpot with Watering Cloud

Whilst searching around for a spare plantpot to pot a small cactus, I thought it would be great to 3D print one out. The shape of a plantpot isn't too difficult to recreate in a CAD program but I wanted something that looks different and fun to water the cactus!

The idea is to have a reasonable sized pot, the cactus isn't very big, but maybe something larger will end up in it later on. To make it look a bit more interesting than a regular plantpot, we're going to create a plastic "Cloud" which can be filled up with water, and, via some sort of support structure, suspend it above the plantpot.

First off the plantpot. The inner dimensions for this are 48mm radius for the lower part, increasing to 53mm towards the top. Plenty of room for our cactus to grow! There are several small holes in the bottom for the excess water to drain out.

Next up, the cloud. This will sit about 250mm above the pot and be held there by a supporting piece of plastic which is coming up! The cloud has a large containing area for the water to be added and lots of small holes in the bottom for the water to be slowly dispensed.

As metioned earlier, the cloud will be suspended above the plantpot and held there by a supporting piece of plastic. As we want the cloud to be quite high above the pot, the support structure needs to be strong and not flex too much, especially when the Cloud is full of water!

When printing this section, we shall increase the fill to 20% and also the number of Shells to 5. Together, these two changes to the print options will result in a strong print that will not flex. We will be doing a post soon to explain the various options you get when printing on a 3D Printer like the MakerBot.

As always, the colour of the prints can be anything you like. I chose Green for the pot, White for the Cloud and Greyish for the support. Here is the finished article, with the cactus in it's new home:

And finally the completed pot with cloud:

If you want to print your own plantpot with optional cloud, here are the files. Enjoy!

Comments

DanOct 05, 2015 06:48

Hi Ray,

The STL files provided can be edited in most polygon based modelling programs, such as Blender. I've just added the original 123D design CAD file so you can edit it with that too.

RayOct 04, 2015 17:16

Dan
Found this from the C5 forum and want to print it for my granddaughter. All OK except the support is too long for my Wanhao 4x. If I use the option 'scale to fit' it reduces distance between the inserts etc. When I import your stl file into Solidworks I don't seem to be able to shorten it by a cm or so. Is the file protected to prevent me editing it please?

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