Permanent Plant Labels

My wife is a Master Gardener and has a VERY large garden.  She plants some things every year.  Normal plant labels don't work, so she asked me to make her some permanent plant labels.

Originally, I created this model in Fusion 360, but that is not as useful a tool for something this simple that you want to configure over and over.  So, I recreated it in OpenSCAD.

The OpenSCAD supports multiple options:

• first_line - the top line (or single line) of text
• second_line - optional second line of text
• font - defaults to “Arial”
• font_scale_factor - used to scale fonts down when you have 1 long word like “Cucumber” and half of it would be in the soil
• text_equal_lines - true/false if you want the first and second lines to be equal sizes. By default it's a 60/40 split in size with the first line being bigger than the 2nd
• add_hole - adds a hole at the tip of the label to allow for hanging it

So, in the image show, the “Bean/Asian Long” uses the default setting for 2 lines.  The “Malabar/Spinach” uses equal lines setting. Kohlrabi is just first_line with no other changes

I started using this a lot and got tired of opening/closing OpenSCAD and doing things manually, so I created a powershell script (I'm a windows user) to run OpenSCAD with the right parameter.

This script was a HUGE pain because of weirdness running OpenSCAD on windows, but I can use it now. (you have to remove the “.txt” off of the file name)

To use the script, do this:

.\CreatePlantLabel.ps1 -FirstLine Malabar -SecondLine Spinach -EqualLines

If you need to pass words with spaces in it, you need to do weird things with the quotes:

.\CreatePlantLabel.ps1 -FirstLine Bean -SecondLine ‘"Asian Long"’

(that is single quotes around double quotes around the string with a space in it)

You can also pass -FontScaleFactor or -Out (to change the output file name).

By default it will construct an output file name for you
 

UPDATE: Added the “add_hole” parameter to create holes in the tip of the stake