Harvest & Curing DIY automated Drying & Curing box

[Frogger]

High ambient air temp is the has always been an issue with Tec based sys .....

 

[Rapha El]

Yeah I keep my cannatrol in my walk in closet and that sits around 72-75. I've noticed during the hot parts of the day it struggles to keep up and will tick up to 68.3 instead of sitting right at 68 like usual.

One of the bigger complaints for me. I live in a tropical climate so it's usually warmer for me in the house, especially in summer. I'd take a broader temp range over a larger unit personally.

you might actually like an experiment i'm going to be running soon. to avoid runaway scenarios i want to test how things behave when i vent all the heat outside the box. i have a few ideas that i want to confirm. the result of which could be a very affordable way to perfectly dry and cure cannabis anywhere. it's not goint to follow the fridge format. every time i open the thing a whole bunch of cold air falls out. totally wasteful.

High ambient air temp is the has always been an issue with Tec based sys .....

yeah there are limits to them but they do offer a greater degree of control over compressor systems while being affordable

 

[Rapha El]

This is the basic idea, I take a plastic box, line it with insulation, put 2 holes in the sides and stick some thermoelectric modules with heatsinks in there and onto the box. The two hot sides of the peltier elements will be "venting" their heat to the outside air (actively cooled aswell) while the cold side of the cooling element will be large with a fan and the dehumidifying one will be small and not have a fan. Everything else concerning power, control and whatnot will be located outside the box.

that's the box. it's pretty sturdy.

my aim is it to build this think portable. While I could be using a fluid loop with a large radiator to get rid of the heat much more efficiently, it would also make the box more prone to damage when being moved. or shipped.

I confirmed my basic idea with the fridge but unfortunately that seems to not be the ideal solution for this. In the end I still have a nice little drink-fridge I can put next to my pc and found my way to a very affordable drying setup.

This will also allow me to more easily experiment with automated venting when co2 levels reach a threshold. The sensors are a bit expensive but I wanna see if I can pinpoint the end of curing by the co2 emissions of the plant material. Lots of ideas.

 

[Rapha El]

I've ported the new, optimized branch to work on the pi and also got the webserver almost fully working with all the new stuff. Ran into some interesting challenges along the way, like the rpi.gpio library straight up not working on the pi 5. But as you can see; the sensor is working, the relays are working (haven't gotten to the h-bridge driver yet) and one direction of the webserver is also working now.
It is honestly so nice to just have gigabytes of ram. Beforehand I had to link to large js libraries on another server just to not completely break the esp32. Now I can run the server, control the hardware, take hid input and drive a local display. Such a fun toy.

 

[Rapha El]

I figured out the cooling and mounting

 

[Rapha El]

Would you pay 400 bucks for a plastic box to dry and cure your weed in? Yeah, me neither but after doing the parts cost for one climate controlled plastic box, it comes out to almost 300€. And only a marginal amount of that is the box itself.

I could see myself spending 120 bucks on a plastic box that controls it's humidity in a way that leads to an 8 day cure regardless of temperature.. So I'm building one of those now. The whole thing is simplified quite a bit, there is no insulation for the container itself and no temperature control, just a monstrously oversized dual-dehumidification solution built into the wall

I've also worked on the web interface some more, here's the current state:

The cooling logic will remain in the code for.. later.