Hello avrdudes! I graduated from university with a degree in biology and pursued a career in instrumentation. Also around this time (2014) I was growing my first marijuana crop and i found out how easy it is to grow but that it was very hard to process to get a good result. In 2016 i did my first arduino project, the dri-uno, when my drier failed due to the circuit board. I replaced the microcontroller with arduino over an entire week of vacation (I also speculated that i might be needing another week of vacation after learning the tortures of programming arduino with millis()).
But afterwards I started speculating about the application of arduino in helping with curing buds. After 6 years of wanting to do something I'm finally doing it! What am i doing? Well, testing a hypothesis:
- I hypothesize that curing marijuana can be done by estimating the respiration rate. Curing is done so that there is less of something (chlorophyl or sugars) that turns the buds to charcoal upon burning. I think the processing of that something depends upon whether or not the plant is still alive - since the processing stops happening if you go below a certain moisture level (hence killing the plant from lack of water). Its very hard to walk the line between inhibiting bacterial growth and keeping the plant alive, thats why nobody sells properly cured weed.
Nowadays i have allot of time on my hands and nothing to show for it, so i thought I'd take my 3d printing and electronic skills and make a vacuum chamber curing machine. I've already started building something i can test my hypothesis out with... I'm using a 12v pump, a stock pot sandwiched between acrylic and wood, and some esp8266 with sensors (co2, pressure, temp, humidity) and SD card. I got the vacuum chamber built but can only pull 7psi before my pot crunches, and I have learned how to do UDP communication between esp's. I plan to use python to visualize the data, i already have some code downloaded! Anyway, this vision of having a relatively sophisticated machine (to what's out there, which is almost nothing like this) which can have cheap 3d printed parts is driving some long hours before spring arrives. I'm hoping to attract some attention to this project and maybe get some help figuring out best practices, I hope to take this all the way to a bonified product with Arduino!
