Outdoor mayhem

Allright its been a while but I'm still at it! I started realizing I wasn't gonna make it very long if i didn't do something about the smell, as the trail is just 30 feet away. I made a containment thing with tarp and green netting, I can also protect it from rain by just folding over the tarp. I'm pretty lucky it works cause you can only get a whiff of something dank here and there, but its also pretty hot and once it cools down you shouldn't be able to smell anything. Also, as a bonus it seems like the plants are using less water since the humidity is higher now.

I picked up a few more projects, one is I'm going to be building an induction heater for dabbing. What is better about it is that I'll be using 18650's as the power source so it is portable. Also, I'm going to be making a bottle jack rosin press before I begin harvesting.
I gotta get the cannaster ready to go again. Somehow the lid isn't sealing right anymore, maybe the heat has warped it... and the electronics are acting up. So I'm about to make some more pourable silicon gaskets and putting in a new pcb next week.
Oh and I had a run in with the authority guy again yesterday. He asked if I am still living up on the ridge ( he has a thing for tearing apart my tents ). I was on my way out and he pulls out his phone and starts recording me, asking if i was going to assault him. I'm not quite sure why he pulled such a bitch move as to hide behind his phone.
Anyways, he assured me he will be back with his friends to take all of my stuff out. I don't really believe it'll ever happen though. But this guy has a knack for showing up at the perfect time, and I'm always nervous when I'm coming out of my grow spot!

Wow, quick update on the budcure box, I finally got around to using the wifi connectivity feature of the d1 mini. So how it'll work is you press the selection button on the home screen and it runs code to connect via wifi. I can turn on tethering in my phone, and the d1 mini will connect to it automatically. Then any other device using the connection on my phone can interact with the d1 mini. Now i can download enviornmental data from the d1 mini on my pc! I am so excited... time to polish up on my python graphing skills!

I'd like to say none of this would be possible without the help of chatgpt. I did some work with the esp8266 in 2020 and just gave up on it, decided to stick with the arduino's. So now I guess we have to talk about pre and post AI since I'm running in another league here!

This whole thread is quite a rush!

I have finally deployed the budcure box into the field, and off of my desk!

While I consider this machine to be a prototype of something better, its about 100% functional with the cheap parts that I built it with. Next year I'm thinking about using thin insulation in the box so i can both heat and cool the interior with the thermoelectic device.
So, the game plan is to harvest two plants every week or two. Since I have 10 plants it should take until mid November at the latest.

Anyway, I just harvested 5 plants that were in the 3 gallon pots. Total weight was 130 grams. I am recording the variables into a csv file to have a look at whats going on. Currently the way I have the machine setup is that you can set the lower bounds for humidity and the TEC will turn off once its reached. I also have the fan whose job it is to recycle the air in the box. I'm setting that as cycles per hour, i.e. you can turn it on x amount of times per hour. And then you can set the amount of time the fan is actually on.
And now I have to get into the python scripts I wrote a few years ago to visualize the data!

Got AI to generate python code to visualize this. As you can see, the weight started off at 130 grams and dropped pretty steadily over the course of 3 days. The status of the marijuana is that it went bone dry and i stuffed it all into this 3D printed jar...

I'm making a rosin press so I'll be able to smoke all this. The ending weight is about 34 grams, initial weight was 134 grams, so it would make water content of the buds to be about 75%. But there was still a little bit of moisture trapped inside the buds.
I only messed this up because the other machine, the cannaster, was having problems (I'm overhauling the electronics now). I would've taken the buds out this morning while they were holding the humidity at 70% and had a weight of 55 grams, and used the cannaster to bring down the humidity levels over the course of the next few days. Obviously this isn't ideal, but imagine this machine in a climate controlled room with infinite electricity from the wall. You could probably get it to cover over 6 days in the budcure box, and another 6 days in the cannaster.
I'm going to wait till the temperature drops a bit, hopefully next week, before starting another harvest. The box reached over 100 degrees, so that is no good!

What a weird day. I woke up and started working on the last part of the Cannaster, and after a few hours I finally got the machine into its final form before trying it out. The way it worked out is that i can only change one variable using the controls (others can be changed in code as needed). So the program has the vacuum pump turning on once an hour unless the humidity gets above a certain threshold, then it will turn on automatically. you can change the "max humdity" variable on the screen. I cap the humidity at 80% and then the pump pulls a vacuum down to 7psi for 3 minutes when either its been an hour or the humidity gets to 80%. So what is happening once i stick my buds in the machine is that the 3 minute vacuum take the humidity down about 20%, and then the buds bring the humidity level up to 80% in about 13 minutes. I've sat around for a while with it and its pretty consistent 13 minutes. I'm thinking by tomorrow it will be pulling once an hour. Then i will decrease the humidity cap to 73% or so for the rest of the day.
So when i was going to my spot and deciding if i should take the bud out of the budcurebox and into the cannaster I hear a very light rapping sound from close by. I waited for about a minute until i confirmed that someone was in my campsite and I was trapped in my grow site. I waited for about 2 hours waiting for them to go away!


So i guess the authority guy is gonna bring in the big equipment to take out all of my aircrete. Hopefully they do not find my nearby growsite! But it was so weird because the plants just stopped smelling a few days ago. Like before the smell would carpet the ground in the vicinity, but now I have to squeeze the buds to smell it. The only thing it could've been is that I ran out of fertilizer a few weeks ago.
Right now I am happy that these machines are so useful to bring in the harvest. The budcurebox seems pretty accurate in keeping up with the moisture evaporation gram by gram. I pulled the buds out this afternoon after it had reached a final weight of 55 grams (out of 120). Last time I had 130 grams dry completely down to 35 grams. They were still wet but the cannaster will handle it overnight tonight.

Ive been working with the Cannaster for a few weeks now. I absolutely maxed out the ATMEGA328 memory at this point so the software is pretty much done until next year, when i can update the hardware. Right now i turn on the pump down to 7psi and hold it there for 5 minutes, every hour. And then I have a setting I can change on the machine that has the max humidity that automatically turns on the pump.
What I'm finding from my initial tests is that the moisture sensor will always read above 90% even though the buds are becoming dryer and dryer. I need to get another sensor to verify this measurement, if correct then i guess I have to track the weight from the budcure box to the cannaster to know when to start jarring them. I already ran an ounce through the cannaster and into a jar. I set the max humidity so that the cannaster would turn on every twenty minutes as the humidity climbed up, and it took only two days to get dry enough that I went ahead and canned them. The weed is lighter than I'd want, but its still moist enough to continue fermentation in the jar. So that is good news, and the smoke is getting smoother everyday. The only problem is that the main cola was too wet and started to mold, so i had to toss it. Its a shame, but I learned the hard way there is no safe amount of mold you can smoke.
But I'm closing in on a workflow here. I took the first two plants out of the BudCure Box while they were still too wet and then over dried them in the Cannaster. Well, not over dry, but I should've spanned out the vacuum pulls instead of letting it go off every 20 minutes. But I still have 8 plants to harvest. Next week I'm going to make a little video showing the workflow from trimming to canning. All that I can do is two plants at a time, and I had to make a new insert to hold more bud inside the cannaster, I think it is pretty cool!


I started collecting humidity data on the Cannaster every 5 minutes. The first 600 minutes was overnight, then between 600 and 800 I opened up the Cannaster to inspect the buds, and then the rest was measured during the day today. All I can tell is that the fluctuations are very consistent but I can't see any obvious signs that the bud is getting dryer or I'm closing in on a moisture content. I'm going to have to see if this cheap (but accurate) humidity sensor is to blame.