Customizable Flower Pot - classic style

thingiverse

Spring is finally here, and it's time to get growing. Here's a customizable flower pot to help you along the way. Now, I'm not entirely sure if PLA is up to the task as a flower pot material (it should be fine), but you don't have to fill them with real plants anyway. Plastic plants would be a great alternative, and Easter eggs or jelly beans could work well in the smaller pots. I've started some catnip seeds in one of the small beige pots with vertical walls. So far, so good - no water seepage through the layers, but just to be safe, I've placed it on a pad. Update: I added a screen to the bottom of the pot for drainage while keeping the soil inside. A common practice is to use a piece of broken pottery to cover the drain hole. Since I didn't want to waste any failed prints, I designed a simple screen instead. You can find the printing instructions in the special settings. Update 2: Don't let your plants get root-bound. Not only is it bad for their health, but plant roots also love getting tangled up in the grooves between print layers, making them harder to remove and re-pot. So, why bother printing a flower pot when you can buy one for under a dollar? Well, that's not really the right question for us Thingiverse folks who print all sorts of unnecessary items. A better question is why I spent hours building this flower pot algorithm in OpenSCAD. To be honest, I was just having fun re-discovering geometry and trigonometry - stuff I hadn't used since high school. Who knew it would come in handy someday? Some notes on using the Customizer: While the program tries to limit values to workable ranges, you can still produce un-printable results if you get a little too creative. For example, the design includes a fillet under the rim of the pot. This is meant to make the pot printable without any supports, but it can look weird and un-pot-like at extreme angles. Here are the Customizer settings: * Pot Side Angle: The number of degrees from vertical (0-30deg in 1-degree increments) * Rim Side Angle: Also, the number of degrees from vertical (0-30deg) * Height of Rim: The height of the rim band around the top-edge of the pot (0-200mm) * Rim Thickness: How thick should the rim be? (0-10mm) * Drain Hole: Select "Yes" to put a drain hole in the bottom of the pot * Pot Risers: If you want risers, you can't also have a drain hole. The program determines the dimensions based on the pot base's diameter. * Sidewall Thickness: The thickness of the pot's walls (1-6mm) * Base Thickness: The thickness of the pot's base (1-7mm) The models included with this "thing" are examples and not necessarily the ones in the photos.