AI Self-Watering Plant Pot 🪴

AI won't take our jobs, it'll just make them easier, and today I'll show you how 🤖.

We'll be building a Self-Watering Plant Pot, and using some "AI", fancy, to enhance the design and optimise the performance of the pot.

After a lot of my plants dying because I'm pretty bad at remembering to water them, I started scouring the internet for a solution, and stumbled across the concept of a self watering plant pot. Let's take a look at how it works🪴.

The principle behind how self-watering pots work lies in a phenomenon called “capillary action”. This is also how plants, including the tallest trees, are able to overcome gravity and draw water from their roots to the very top of the plant🌴.

The concept is simple:

Capillary action also occurs in soil, and by using this fact, we can create a reservoir for the water and place the soil inside it. The soil and water are separated by a thin membrane that only allows water in, and doesn't let the soil out. We then let capillary action bring the water from the reservoir to the roots of the plant, and keep the plant hydrated 🌱.

Okay, but why do we even need to add AI?

Good question... Well, in our case, we can use AI to optimise the design of the pot, by finding a way to maximise the surface area of the soil in contact with the water. This allows a larger portion of the soil to be exposed to the water, and thus remain hydrated. This makes it easier for the roots of younger plants to access the water, and drink up that tasty H2O, yum 💧.

Here's a list of what you'll need to recreate this project:

Software:

• Ultimaker Cura (or any other slicer)
• Fusion 360 (eligible students, educators, and qualifying educational institutions should have free access to it)

Supplies:

• Access to a 3D printer (if you don't have your own, check with your local library, or college)
• PLA Filament (any colour is fine, I chose Black)
• Spunbond (I recycled mine from old shopping bags)
• A small plant of your choice (I used Lemon Balm Mint)
• A pair of scissors
• A crafting knife

Some experience with Fusion 360 is helpful, but it's not essential. I managed just fine without any prior experience, so you should too!

*If you're itching to print it NOW, you can just grab the final .STL files and get to a 3D printer ASAP.

Let's jump straight into the main element, the AI Enhanced Pot.

Fire up a new project in fusion and let's get started!

The first step is to design all the components for the pot which will be used to generate the AI part of the pot. For this we will need bodies for the preserve geometries, obstacle geometries and starting shape for the different sections of the pot.

Here's a breakdown of what all this means:

• Preserve Geometries - The bodies that you want to keep in final design, the AI shouldn't touch these.
• Obstacle Geometries - Areas or shapes that the AI should design around and it should ensure that it does not obstruct those spaces.
• Starting Shapes - An idea of the shape that you are expecting to get.

In my case, these were my preserve geometries, obstacle geometries, and starting shapes:

For any advanced Fusion 360 users who want to have a go at redesigning the entire pot from sketch onwards, have a go at it, but that is beyond the scope of this project. But note that:

Designing something that incorporates Generative AI requires you to have a lot of extra components, so make sure that you design in a modular manner (I learnt this the hard way)

For everyone else, you can just download the bodies and load them into the fusion project. Let's move onto the next step. 🏃‍♂️💨

For this step, we will set up a study that will allow us to use Generative AI ,that comes pre-built in Fusion 360, to help us optimise the design. As mentioned earlier, our optimisation is an attempt to maximise the surface area of the soil exposed to the water:

1. Open the Generative Design tab in fusion and create a new Study.
2. Click "Edit Model", and make sure that all your bodies you've created are selected.
3. In the Ribbon, select "Design Space" and allocate the bodies to their respective categories.

Next, select "structural constraints" in the ribbon and select the base of the pot as the "fixed constraint".

When you are done, it should look something like this:

Great, now let us add the load constraints:

Load constraints allow us to tell the AI what it should look out for when designing the element, basically, make sure the component that you design can support this load.

For this component, we only need to apply distributed loads, which is forces acting on a surface. Imagine a pile of books on a table, the books apply a force that is distributed over the entire table. Apply distributed loads on all the inner surfaces of the pot like shown below.

This part of the project is what we change to tweak the final design that the AI will generate to give us a design that is usable. I played around with a lot of different load cases so that the final design could look the way it did :) These were my final force settings for each force:

For this step, we tell the AI which material we are expecting to print with. Although you may be thinking, "oh, I'll just use plastic 🤓☝️" your choice may have more of an impact than you think...

When the AI designs the component, it takes into consideration the physical material properties of your selected material so that the design can withstand your load constraints.

I selected PLA as my material. If PLA is not a listed material in your fusion 360, follow this tutorial to add it.

For the objectives, in order to get the desired shape, we need to select the "Minimize Mass" objective, the other option will probably result in you getting a lump of plastic for a pot...

Depending on your Manufacturing Method, and constraints, adjust those accordingly, but for my standard 3D printer, I used the following settings:

We have finally reached the peak of the project, Generative AI 🤖.

Click Generate and watch the AI work its magic, generating some of the most unintuitive designs that meet our given constraints and optimisations.

As with any AI-generated design, it might not be perfect on the first try, but just change some of the load constraints and it should give you a different design. Unfortunately there is no guide to prompt engineering, but you've got this.

This is the final design:

Next is the design of the reservoir that will hold the water. There was no AI component to this part of the project.

Once again, if you are up to the task of designing your own, go for it. But I have attached the reservoir body that I designed.

Fire up your 3D printer and get ready to print.

Pro Tip: If you're using a 3D slicer software (like Cura, which I used for this project), enable a setting called "adaptive layer height." This will minimise layer steps on the final print, resulting in a smoother finish.

Once the components are printed, you'll need to remove the supports. If they are too hard to remove by hand, you can use a crafting knife. Be patient and careful during this process!

Enjoy a short highlight reel to get you as excited about the print as I was 🤭.

Cut a 30cm diameter circle from the spunbond. This will be the membrane that separates the plant's soil from the water in the reservoir.

Wrap the soil of the plant in the spunbond and place it in the pot. If the edges of the spunbond stick out, trim them with scissors to tidy up the edges.

Congratulations, you have reached the step we have all been waiting for! Pour water into the reservoir through the tube and relax as your pot takes care of the rest  💧.

I was very pleased with the final result of the project🌱. It was my first time using a lot of the technology in the project and as a whole I found this project very rewarding. From learning how to use the AI features in Fusion 360, to watching my first 3D print, it was a journey I don't regret embarking on 🛣️.

On a more personal note: something I noticed throughout this project is that although putting together final product was fun, I found myself enjoying the journey more often than not. Running around searching for help on fusion, the misprints, the complete redesigns, searching for the perfect song for the youtube video, those are the moments I remember the most. So, as you embark on your maker journey, I hope you learn to find the joy in the little things in these projects because that is what gives you the motivation to continue and create more✨.

As for future iterations of this project, I think the concept has the potential to be further scaled for application in greenhouse and indoor farming practices, optimising water usage, providing consistent growth conditions, and enabling automation, just to name a few.

But for now, I'll be using the pot to prevent more of my plants from drying out🫡.

~I hope you enjoyed this instructable and have a go at building your own!