In today's day and age, both hobbyist and survival horticultural practices are been becoming more of a nor within our culture. As the amount of people entering the hobby increase, there is a growing demand for better and cheaper gardening products. I have also joined in on this new growing hobby and have personally found that commercial horticultural equipment is expensive to purchase; so to combat this, I have embarked on creating a line of 3-D printable hydroponic/agricultural products (all open source of course). The first item that I have created is called a "Hydro halo drip ring", and is used to evenly water plants from a central location using a timer and a water pump.

(Picture of completed print will be provided later.)

Bill of Materials

• 3-D Printing filament (i.e. PLA, ABS, etc.) <= That is the only material you need to print this part!
• SCAD/STL file of the hydro drip ring

Scad and STL files available at http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:577334/#files

Tools needed

• MOST Delta RepRap or similar RepRap 3-D printer

Skills and knowledge needed

Nothing more than basic 3D printing and altering well commented variables to get desired size required

Technical Specifications and Assembly Instructions

I used Openscad for the model, Cura for the slicer, and Repetier-Host to print the part. Open the.SCAD file in Openscad, and adjust the given parameters to fit your needs. All units are in millimeters

. Note: The hydroponic halo is currently set with a 6" diameter and can handle a 1/2 inner diameter hose connection.

Approximate print time (assuming original model is left un-altered) estimate: 3 hours 20 minutes

Cost savings

1. My design used $3.13 in plastic at $25/Kg (i.e. 125 grams of polymer were used to print this)
2. Commercial Hydro halo like this will cost around 11 dollars
3. The total estimated savings are therefore approximately 71.54%!

References

▼This page was part of an MTU course MSE4777 OA and MSE4777 OB/MSE5777/EE4777/EE5777: Open-source 3-D printing

Please leave comments using the talk page. The course runs in the Fall semester. It is not open edit.