3D Printed Self Watering Planter

It's summer and in India and Kolkata has a Tropical wet-and-dry climate. Summers are hot and humid with temperatures in the low 30's and during dry spells, the maximum temperatures often exceed 40 °C. It's Really Hard for plants to survive without water. For people like me, it's hard to water them time and keep them alive but this Planter.
So taking the opportunity of the Planter Challenge, I will try to Design a self-watering planter.
But the Challenge Is to Design in to design it on Tinkercad
Though Fusion 360 is a far better software to design but in this Ible lets take the challenge and try to make the best use of tinkercad.
If you like this project vote for it Planter Challenger

Ok before designing let's start talking about the design challenges.

Design Challenges

1. Self-watering System
2. Modular Design
3. Lucrative Design
4. Easy to 3D print with any printer without support

Why Self Watering System?

• No need to water every day. Saves Water & Time
• Beautiful. Ideal for office, home
• Easy to maintain, when you travel or go out on weekend.
• Water once in a week or 10 days depending on weather conditions.
• Ideal for growing herbs in the kitchen or cleaning air indoor.

Now I studied some usual Self-watering Design and I got these three design most used.

• Self-watering using Wick
• Self-watering using Absorption Stones
• Self-watering with Aeration using a wick

Now the main part of the build is the water reservoir, this will contain the water in it which the plan will use in time.

To make the reservoir I used a cube and scaled it to 100 mm and then I used an empty box to cut it to make the rounded bottom and top flat. Once it was done I recreated a copy of it using and turned that into a hollow box so that I cut it and make the reservoir.

Now it was time to make the top part where we will place the plant.
We start by making a copy of the reservoir. Then we make a copy of the copy and scale it down by 5 mm this will make the slot to fit in the reservoir.
Using an empty cube we cut the scaled down box to make the slot.
Now it was time to join both the box with group feature.
Now the last thing left with the top part is to make a hole for the filter part to fit in.
Using a cylinder we make a copy a hole and group it.

The last part of this design is the filter.
This part will be dipped in water.
I made this separate just to reduce support.
This made with a cylinder and parabolic extrusion which was made as a shell by cutting a similar shape scaled down by 2.5 mm

Then using the honeycomb generator I created the pattern for the holes through which water will go inside

Now it was time to make the reservoir a bit funky, I used the Voronoi shape generator to add the texture to all the four side of the pot, I must say the design looks better now.

A Voronoi diagram is sometimes also known as a Dirichlet tessellation. The cells are called Dirichlet regions, Thiessen polytopes, or Voronoi polygons. Voronoi diagrams were considered as early at 1644 by René Descartes and were used by Dirichlet (1850) in the investigation of positive quadratic forms.

I thought it would be also good to add a cactus icon in the top part. I imported an SVG and engraved it on the Top panel. I used 2.5mm thickness on it.
The engraving was done by cutting a hollow object in one of the sides of the top part.

The Top part was printed in white PLA from solid space. It was printed on my Anet A8 with the following setting

• Infill 20%
• .2mm layer
• 200 C Temp
• 40 mm/s print speed

The Top part was printed in Red PLA from Esun space. It was printed on my Anet A8 with the following setting

• Infill 20%.
• 2mm layer
• 200 C Temp
• 40 mm/s print speed

The Top part was printed in Black PLA from Wanhao space. It was printed on my Anet A8 with the following setting

• Infill 20%
• . 2mm layer
• 200 C Temp
• 40 mm/s print speed

The Top part was printed in Black PLA from Wanhao space. It was printed on my Anet A8 with the following setting

• Infill 15%
• . 1mm layer
• 200 C Temp
• 40 mm/s print speed

It's now time to assemble them. The reservoir parts will be fixed by super glue and the top part just snaps on the reservoir.
The filter also fits in the top part easily with a snug fit.

I highlighted the Engraving with a marker and the shifted the plant into the planter.
Doesn't it look amazing?
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