Flexible 5cm net cup for non-flexible filaments

IMPORTANT: make sure you enable “Detect thin walls” in PrusaSlicer when slicing the file. Also, when printing this file, the printer has to make a lot of retractions, so stringing is likely.

I wanted to design my own flexible net cups to use in my hydroponic system. However, I didn't have any experience with printing flexible filaments and didn't feel like buying a spool of such pricey material only to print some net cups.

I therefore spent quite a while on designing a net cup which is somewhat flexible (not as flexible as a net cup bought online of course), which can be printed with PLA filament.

The net cup I ended up with consists of 20 faces, 10 of which have 3 holes in them. These faces needed to be straight so that the printer would print straight lines instead of breaking each line into two separate lines to create the curvature.

The design of the square holes might not be very aesthetically pleasing, but it is functional. The net cup needed to be able to be squeezed without breaking.

The bottom of the net cup consists of separated triangles, so that each triangle has space to move without the bottom breaking apart. 

I added a 5cm ring below the ridge on the top so that the net cup would fit securely in a 5cm hole.