Any Size Parametric Plant/Pot Tray!! (15 Parameters)

Any Size Plant Pot Tray (Parametric)

15 parameters of variation!

I’ve needed to print a bunch of these in different sizes over the years. I finally decided to just make a parametric version so I can print the exact size I need. 

You can adjust the size, side wall length/height, the thickness of the base and side, the angle of the side wall, corner bevels, a bunch of settings for the inside water drainage ribs, and the PolyLevel (which will allow you to make hexagon, octagon and other shapes out of the tray).  Most of these settings should be self-explainable, but I will describe each one below.

As with most parametric models, they are not perfect and I wasn’t going to spend the time handling every possible combination of values a user could enter.  If you put in stupid parameters, you’re going to get stupid results 😊

If you're not familiar and/or hate using OpenSCAD, you can use MakerWorld's Customizer here (https://makerworld.com/en/models/2233635-any-size-parametric-plant-pot-tray#profileId-2430533) to create any custom sizes you may want. Prusa, this it really something you need to add to your site!!!!

Printing

Supports

Most designs including the pre-generated STLs/Print-Profiles will not require and supports and will be waterproof.  If you set the wall to a low angle and/or set the outer bevel to a high number you may need supports (It should be obvious, if your pointier is printing rings around the outside of the tray that aren’t attached to anything, you need supports). But for the most part I tried to design it so that most normal parameters would not need supports.

Water Proofing

Most newer printers w/ standard settings “should” be water proof.  I don’t have any trouble with my Bambu’s (however, my Ender3 struggled to make things water proof).  If you’re having trouble, the easiest things to try are:

• Add more walls, bottom/top shell layers

• Slow down your printer!  (This fixes a lot of problems) 

Parameters

NOTE: I've uploaded the settings for all the print profiles in the “PlantPotTray.txt” attached in the "Other Files" section (It's actually JSON not text, so you can rename the file to .json to use it in openSCAD).  That should help you create the correct sizes for any square trays you want to create as I've already done the calculations for the square's width.

Dimensions

InsideWidthMm
This is inside width of the tray in MM (Not including the bevel.  The bevel will take up some of the inside width, so plan accordingly)
NOTE: When using the PolyLevel, the InsideWidthMm will be the “largest” inside width (sorry, it's just the way it works and It's too hard to do the calculations for every possible shape).  This means that if you set the PolyLevel to 4 (a square), the InsideWidthMm  will be the measurement from corner to corner, not side to side.  So, you will either need to brush off your trigonometry, or do some trial and error to figure out the correct size for anything other than a circle.

SideLengthMm:
This is how long the sides are.  I didn’t call this height, because height would assume we’re accounting for the angle. We’re not, so this is that true length of the side no matter what the angle is.

SideAngleDegrees:
This is the angle(degrees) of the side.  90 would be vertical, 0 would be flat on the build plate.

BaseThicknessMm:
How thick do you want the base?

SideThickness:
How thick do you want the side? This is in MM even though I didn’t label it… sorry.

Bevels

InsideBevelRadius:
The radius of the inside wall bevel. Again mm, even though it’s not specified.

OuterBevelRadius:
This is the radius of the outside bevel, again mm, even though it’s not specified. with a few notes… 
the radius will be what you entered, however, I’m only using a part of that circle to cut out the bevel.  This is to make sure that the outside wall ends up being more vertical and printable (printing circular overhangs don’t work very well).  So, you’ll likely need to use a larger value than you expect here to get the desired effect.

Inside Ribs

RibWidth:
Again mm, this is the width of the raised ribs that allow water to flow under the pot.

RibHeighPctOfRibWidth:
This was me being lazy. But this affects the height of the rib as a percentage of the rib width. Therefore, if you have a rib width of 5mm, and you set this to .2, then you’ll have a rib height of 1mm.  Valid values are from 0 - 0.50.  Anything above .5 will be the same a .5 and the rib height will be 1/2 the rib width.  If below zero, there won’t be any ribs.

RibInnerBuffer:
Again mm. This is how far from the center you need to be before starting the ribs.

RibOuterBuffer:
Again mm. This is the buffer from the outside edge where you want to stop adding ribs. 

RibSpacing:
Again mm. how much space do you want in-between the ribs?

 RibFillAngle:
The rotational angle(degrees) for each set of ribs.  If you make this too big there won’t be any gaps in the ribs for water flow (I.E. if you set RibSections =2, and RibFillAngle to a value >= 180 then the ribs will for a full circle.

RibSections:
How many sections of ribs do you want? The default is 8 with each section covering 35 degrees. 

Poly Level

PolyLevel:
This can be set from 5 to 200.  Basically, the bigger the number the smoother the tray circle will be. 4 will make a square, 5 will make a pentagon, 8 will make an octagon, anything over 100 basically make a circle, but technically (like most STLs) if you look closely you can see that they really small triangles that make up the outside face/shell of the object (welcome to 3d Printing).