I was looking at eventually getting a AC infinity 69pro but that’s a ways off seeing how expenisve that solution is. I found a few interesting controllers on aliexpress that have both temp and humidity control and have built in wifi and bt for using various apps like home assistant. I’ve never used any of the apps it references and thought maybe somebody here has. Wonder how hard it would be for some of the devs to build a purpose app specific to drying and curing, perhaps some AI to help manage it?
Anyways, I was going to try my mini fridge this summer and wanted to get a cheap controller with both temp and humidity built in on the cheap for now <$40. I was shocked to find that inkbird doesn’t have units with both built in so I started looking at pids and found the above.
For lotus you’ll at least be running a fridge through it. Can those safely and reliably run those appliances when you are out of the home? The ACI 79 is basically the best bang for your buck right out of the gate as far as programmability AND electrical needs. My cabinet which is basically just a cannatrol runs off an ACI 69 Pro. Required some extra adapters and wiring for me that way.
You can easily rig the ACI 69 Pro or higher up as a step function on humidity. Otherwise the only good builds for this that I’ve seen have been from dudes that have access to equipment to print their own PCB boards and stuff. Beyond me.
The first link will blow above 10A. Doubt a fridge would be safe on that IMO. The second link has multiple reviews about the frequency of temp readings being too low for real time applications. As hardware, it is a great price but for the application I do not know.
I think it was rated for 10A which should be enough to run a few full size fridges but I’d only be running just one. I was hoping since most of us don’t have the skills to build our own hardware we could find something like these devices that have multiple channels and built in wifi bt.
The AC 69 pro is so close. I was thinking with the hardware available above we could move the algo / logic processing, programing, graphing, notifications etc… to a android app. All we needed was a electrical switch with remote capabilities to communicate with it like the built in wifi and bt those have. The app would run the show. With the app having some cpu and ram ,via andriod tablet or phone , as opposed to the AC stuff we could generate nice beautiful graphs with grafana or something.
I those devices won’t work maybe we could find a chinese company willing to modify one of these devices to be a robust electrical switch that can be managed remotely since that’s all we need minus the app.
The ac infinity wall adapter is rated 15A and you can find plenty of horror stories about it blowing, even a few about complete failures. The newest 69 pro and above updates with the buffering and targeting options for automation are really convenient for me. Get a wine fridge and clock the sensor then set at a constant. Use cannatrol logic to target Aw and DP based off the RH driven secondary peltier. It makes the build as simple as buying parts from AC Infinity, a dehumidifer peltier, and a wine cooler. Even a no wiring build you can do with ACI.
Maybe AC Infinity’s supplier will be one of the people in China on TikTok going full sherman marching through atlanta and start selling direct. I know what you want. There are two people’s builds recently I have seen. They each had maker-studio level access for printing boards and basic EE knowledge. The one dude, avacado farmer or something?, on THCFarmer has a full Cannatrol premium deluxe version coded by hand with about double the options of a cannatrol and more complexed targeting. He went dark over patent concerns. Cannatrol has a patent for a double peltier feedback loop curing system.
I feel like anyone with the will and ability to make what you are looking for is going to be privy to the recent research and be going after thermoelectric non-compressor driven coolers only. That puts their build in the cross hairs of cannatrol’s patent in their minds.
Thermoelectric doesn’t work in hot areas like where I live and millions of others. It’s way too expensive to keep my home cool enough for them to work correctly. A compressor driven fridge is golden in this area and in my opinion works better than thermoelectric anyways regardless of location. Much more durable over the years as well IMHO, I see the peltier coolers being thrown out all the time here as they stop working within a few years. The compressor based fridges just keep going.
Also, the dehu people are putting in are being used for the sole purpose of raising the internal heat thus kicking on the main cooling system to draw down humidity. With that being the case I’d personally just put in a small incandescent light bulb.
If a small peltier had the hot side outside of the curing chamber I could see this as a potential of reducing RH without significant cooling from activating the main cooling system. Does cannatrol do this? Additionally, you can’t get sued for using the same principals, now if he dumped the firmware and cloned it then sure. If you have a link I’d like to look at it.
I’d like options… like personally using VPD and having the logic and functions configurable by a opensource community. Additionally, the graphing and historical data needs storage. A droid tabled or phone would be great for this. Notifications would be easy to since it would hook into the android subsystem.
Unfortunately, the research their team and others have been doing with the cannatrols is definitive - using a compressor-driven device for drying or curing tears the cuticle heads to shreds. Most of these studies have 30% or more being damaged. Cannatrol averages 2% damaged heads. The entire concept is not in the temperature, there is a cannatrol-principles setting for 88F where the dew point would still be acceptable (theoretically). The concept is being able to target active water/dew point just coincidentally due to the inherent properties of the peltier not impacting bound/unbound water in the flower. The closest thing you can get with current tek is the lotus cure, and it is still in a different category.
The dehumidifier unit is being placed inside to target only dew point by means of targeting RH and knowing the temp. The other peltier doesn’t care about the RH but only looks at temp. Link their loops… then do a step or slope function to your final values.
I agree about the patent. I have experience with the USPTO during this timeframe and I can say that dude is a literal beast getting that patent pushed through so quickly during those years… The patent is very vague. Essentially just a double-peltier feedback loop curing system, and unfortunately you can very much so patent generic things. It also costs very little to be taken to court for infringement. I don’t agree with it. I don’t think those guys were at risk either, they fundamentally misunderstand cannatrol’s business…those $1600 home units are toys/novelties as a gift to the community. Their business is in pre-fabbed commercial and commercial retrofits…
The dude has a patent for something that he basically pulled out of his butt…that is going to be the future for cannabis drying and curing worldwide…that just happens to be really simple. Regardless of if someone gets sued for it or not, the research is too clear - this is the only proper way to be drying/curing if your goal is maximizing preservation of cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavorents. It simply is the future. If someone managed to get a patent on fire, that isn’t going to stop others from cooking their meat now too.
He can’t patent thermodynamics but he can patent the controller where the algos are which I do agree are proprietary to him.
“The dehumidifier unit is being placed inside to target only dew point by means of targeting RH and knowing the temp. The other peltier doesn’t care about the RH but only looks at temp. Link their loops… then do a step or slope function to your final values.”
But it’s impossible to do this when the cold and hot side are both in the enclosed chamber. The dehu will have condensate on the cold side just like the main cooling condenser. But, it also releases heat which turns on the main cooling and is why most people use it which has been stated a few times here from those that are using dehu in TE wine fridges. Maybe some can chime in.
Moving the hot side outside the drying changer would provide target control to a degree. I assume this is how cannatrol is doing this. A small peliter with the hot side outside would allow one to have more of a target or maintenance control helping to keep a tighter control on humidity while the main cooling system is off without adding any significant cooling capacity overall this having a tighter control on temp.
The other stuff about about the cuticle heads…I don’t know man sound really far fetched. A TE vs Compressor based cooler shouldn’t have any differentiating factors other than efficiency. Both are using the concept of condensing hot air to remove moisture. Given all other factors it seems like a sales ploy. Again the magic for the cannatrol is in the software which I believe the tech community could duplicate. Besides, freeze drying is a recognized industrial standard for quality and preservation that should really destroy those cuticles whatever they are.
Have you ever dried in a kitchen freezer…it works very well via sublimation. It was some of the best weed I ever had. Super cold by slow drying.
Again, TE style fridges do not work well at all in hot environments. Didn’t somebody here do a comparison, maybe it was reddit, of a compressor vs TE dry and the compressor came out on top without any dehu in the compressor one …and they just targeted temp I believe.
In any regards whatever we could come up with would work in both styles so I don’t want to focus on TE vs Compressor fridges. This post was more about the software and hardware.
He hasn’t patented thermodynamics. he has patented an idea, that in hindsight seems simple. And he has patented it in multiple countries - so this isn’t a one-off ooopsie it got through the patent office patent. The two peltiers are vastly different sizes. The effect of heat from the dehumidier unit is negligible relative to the much larger cooling peltier. A lot of people fundamentally do not understand the cannatrol and have thrown together piles of parts that they think are similar. If you still had that type of issue inside of your unit, you’d change the voltage across the peltiers. Literally saw the top DIY cannatrol video on youtube plug a 110V right into his peltier and call it a day. Yeah, that worked for a few hours probably.
The research on cuticle heads does sound far fetched, but then again research categorically and demonstrably proving that we have been drying cannabis wrong for decades is going to sound far fetched. Not only have they corroborated this research manually, they sent it externally and had it confirmed by computer. Any compressor cycle device during the dry phase ruins cutivle heads by A_w and VP delta gradients…essentially you are ripping the bound water out of the cannabis while also contracting and expanding a cuticle that is only 2 molecules thick…they break…this is the smell in your tent and in your dry and in your bag. Properly dried cannabis has nearly zero smell until broken up in a grinder. This research is definitive. It is also logical. This is stuff you can confirm with time. Get your microscope out and go to 50x or so, grid out trichome heads, and count ruptures and tears. Now buy a cannatrol (or use someone who understands it correctly and rigged it up per the original’s methodology) then compare. Every lab/scientist who has so far has confirmed ~35% ruptures on average for non-cannatrol dry/cure and ~2% ruptures for cannabis dried and cured with the cannatrol. They got so sick of reaffirming this manually, they created a new chromatography method to observe trich head integrity (ruptured heads refract different spectrum than non-ruptured head). Computer confirmed, and confirmed, and confirmed.
I think that the fridge aspect of it might stuck in the thinking. The fact that it is a fridge is a mere coincidence. The only part that matters for the “”“frige”“” portion is that it can impact temperature without making the bound/unbound water in the environment go wild (aka no-compressor). The efficiency or capacity of the fridge is largely irrelevant. This design is purposefully made from a first principles approach to make your environment irrelevant. We are talking about hypotheticals. The patent holder for cannatrol is a controls engineer by trade who is the dude who kicked off an Italian cheese industry in Vermont…which does not have the environment anywhere in the state to make said cheeses.
Freeze drying is nice if you need to rapidly remove water from something, although not the industry standard for preservation. Drying and curing is our species’ primary way of preserving, and it has been for centuries. Meats? We use cannatrol-eque loops. Cheeses? We use canntrol-eque loops. Cigars? We use cannatrol-eque loops. Artifacts? We use cannatrol-eque loops.
Definitely hope some more people get involved in this discussion. I still think jailbreaking some ACI equipment would be a good starting point.
You can’t patent ideas either. To be clear the algos in their custom controller is the only thing they can patent…big deal I don’t want their software which was the whole purpose of this post. I’ll say it again, the magic for their patent is in the controller 'Pid" software.
You bring up the size of the secondary peltier and say it’s insignificant. I get what you’re saying but fact remains it’s a circular feedback loop with the hot side in the same chamber. And people do report they use it to primary add heat to activate the thermostat of the main cooling unit not so much they need lower temp but they need to condense to bring down humidity. My bet is having the hot side outside the chamber would allow tighter control over humidity without temp swings. As in I agree with you the smaller surface area is less significant than the large one but it does add enough heat to turn the thermostat on. The cool side being isolated would still add a little cool air but not overall significant to temp but could allow humidity to be “maintained” longer while the main cooling system is off.
“If you still had that type of issue inside of your unit, you’d change the voltage across the peltiers”
Exactly which is why I wanted features like PWM on the diy project.
Compressor vs TE is so absurd IMHO. The only difference is their efficiency. Compressors are much more efficient especially in hot climates where TE doesn’t work or doesn’t work well. It’s just simple thermodynamics, they are both achieving the same end result of condensing hot air. I could understand if you were saying the compressor has to run less amount of time which is true as it’s much more efficient due to how much colder the condenser coils gets. But, compressor based units are reliable and generally last much longer than the TE wine coolers. And, as I’ve mentioned a few times they work in environments TE doesn’t.
Not trying to be rude but that cuticle research that they found only happens with compressor based units seems so convenient. Assuming all variables the same…temp and humidity there should be no difference between the two technologies. It’s like comparing carbs vs fuel injection. They both achieve the same thing where fuel injection is more responsive and efficient.
Cannatrol didn’t break some secrete code of thermodynamics. What they did was design software to monitor the environmentals and adjust them automatically for the best possible outcome regarding drying and curing.
Perhaps we should just forget the “cannatrol” and concentrate on how to take lotus curing and make it more effective, efficient and automated.
The ACI could probably be Jtag and dump the firmware. If it can be updated and the vendor provides a bin file …bin walk on linux might be able to pulls some gems out. But now we’re talking about potential legal issues. I’d rather just have a app that can handle all this and a electrical switch that has all the inputs and outputs we need.
Whatever we ended up with could be used with TE or compressor based units. In fact, that should be part of the software where one could select which tech there were using so little tweaks could be specific. If we tear a few cuticles in the process I’m ok with it.