The Final Project

The Final Project

For our final project, we wanted to accomplish something so special that it would blow our competition out of the water. In order to accomplish this, we decided to involve our project in our community to make it a better place. We then thought about the success of our plant waterer. When we made it, we had the intention of it working, but we never imagined it would have the effect on the health and growth of plants that it did. We decided that an innovative way to positively benefit our community would be to help grow herbs and small vegetables for our school lunchroom.

Obviously, doing something this significant would require much effort, and permission from school administration. We decided to schedule a meeting with the lunchroom manager at Pine Crest, Ms. Tiffany Wade. When we explained our idea to her, she was enthusiastic about participating. In order to best accommodate the new plan for the project, we redesigned the RAD Plant Waterer to suit the plants better. As we scaled it up, we ran into more issues, resulting in a need for iteration of the original design and in each new print we solved those issues.

Our first design was a scaled up version of the waterer, with a slightly larger hole for the plants to grow out of. We had this print for Rosemary, Parsley, and Basil. We sent these to the printer around the same time we ordered the pots where we would plant the plants. The online dimensions ended up being the diameter including the plastic rim around the edge. For all three we had to trim about 3-4 mm of plastic off of the bottom. The second problem we had to address with the second iteration was the fact that the bridge in between the funnel and the circular part that infused the water into the soil kept falling off as we were removing the bridging. We decided to make it have a larger connection to the top of the circular part, instead of connecting it to the floor piece.

As the picture shows, the second version is clearly better. It looks neater, and it is much more effective.

The third iteration was made specifically for the plants that grow underground. The RAD was almost completely redesigned to suit short carrots and scallions. We redesign the RAD in order to fulfill the needs that are needed by carrot and scallions. For example carrots need a lot of space under ground to grow, so we removed the bottom part of the design in order to add a wedge for better support to the design. We also redesign the funnel and how it is connected to the main part of the RAD. We changed the funnel so it can support more water at one time. The final design change that we did to the RAD is we made the hole where the plants grow wider to provide more space for the plants and also allow more room for sunlight to go in. These changes created the perfect waterer design.

As a team, we are really proud of the impact we have created. We never would have imagined the success we have had on this project. We look forward to tasting the fruits of our labor in our school lunches.