Pineapple PlanteR

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?... SpongeBob, but those turbines are interesting too.

I am undoubtedly a huge fan of the Spongebob Squarepants series, and the idea for this model came after I designed Squidward’s Easter Island home into a functioning pencil cup. The pencil cup gained a lot of attention in the Thingiverse community, and after seeing the amount of enjoyment it was receiving, I knew I had to build one in the shape of Spongebob’s house. So in continuing with this series, I took on the pineapple house and saw its potential as a succulent plant pot. 

On paper, this model should be simple. It seemed like it was just a cropped ellipsoid with a few details on the surface. But it became difficult to design when it was time to create the spiral grooves. While the surface may have been radially symmetrical, there was nothing symmetrical about the arc that was being rotated. 

This was also before the inclusion of the emboss feature in Fusion360 and any hopes of performing that was not a possibility. Any attempt I had made using an extrusion of a two dimensional object to cut into the figure left me with an inconsistent depth of the groove which did not meet my standards. For this to work I would need a way to create a spiral tangent to the surface. I had to stop and rethink the project.

So I walked away from it. For months...

During my break from this project, I became very interested in turbines. I learnt from a video that turbines could be made and customized by creating many lines with one end point aligned to a surface, then rotating them around a radially symmetrical solid. The loft of these lines would form a spiral surface. This led me to experiment with creating my own turbines in Fusion360. 

Then it hit me.

I realized that this same method to produce turbine blades could be used to form spiral cuts into the planter as long as I extended the spirals edge into the figure. And there was the solution to my problem, found in a completely different subject area.

This is so far my most popular design with over 64,000 views, 80,000 downloads, and multiple Reddit threads discussing it. It was also spotlighted on All3DP on their review of the Lulzbot Mini 2. 

But the biggest reward was the lesson I learnt. This project is an example of the strength in interdisciplinary thinking that comes from being curious. Since this project, I have made it part of my creative process to asking myself, “What methods or systems currently exist and provide a function or solution to a similar problem?”. For example, in the case of developing systems to create robotic swarms, one may find solutions in studying how ants maneuver and communicate seamlessly. Or in another project that is on this website, Droplite, a lot of our mechanical engineering problems were solved by repurposing mechanisms found in Nerf guns.

My personal favorite. This is the pineapple planter on Nickelodeon's online store and sold online on Target. Not only is it very similar, but look at the copyright year on the bottom... one year after I published mine.