Hello everyone, I'm wondering if there's any interest here in an open-source DIY vape kit?
Just to give a little background, I recently got into vaping cannabis and have been wondering why there's not a single product on the market (at least as far as I can tell) that heats a 510 cart based on temperature readings. The most customization you can get is to push a certain voltage to your cart for a certain amount of time. The problem with this heating methodology is that you will get inconsistent hits based on a HUGE number of factors, such as:
- the output voltage
- ambient temperature
- whether or not you preheat
- whether it's your 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. hit in a row (starting cart temp)
- how much oil is left in the cart
- the heating element in the cart
- the thickness of the oil in the cart
- circuit resistance
- how hard and long you breathe in
My plan to solve this is to use
- multiple thermistors for temperature
- a pressure sensor
- a humidity sensor
- an air quality sensor
- PWM 5v output with strict circuit timing
- a small 5v fan
using this combination of parts and sensors, my testing methodology would be to find and record the temperature at which a cart first vaporizes, discover if there is a measurable air quality difference between a good hit and a "burnt" one, and possibly use this data to find the max temperature of a good hit. Once I have the upper and lower bound temps of a good hit, we can start to play with heating curves. If this kit is easy enough to manufacture, the next step would be ask other people to test their own carts and create a community database of optimal heating curves for specific carts!
the long term plan would be to have a mobile app that can sync community heating profiles straight to your DIY vape, with the option to flip between profiles directly from the vape itself so the mobile app will be optional after the initial setup.
The bill of materials for all these sensors may be outside of the price range of your typical vaper, so there will be a 2nd build of the DIY vape that eliminates most of the sensors except for the thermistors. This build will mainly be targeted as being a much more portable end product, mainly using data already collected by the community.
I am also planning to take into account people that may be interested in the community data even if they don't plan on building their own vape. This data can be useful for people who own a vape battery with adjustable voltage who just picked up a new vape cart and have no idea what voltage to use.
The problem:
Other than my own time and the starting equipment costs, it will be a relatively inexpensive project (hopefully). However, hosting an online community database and publishing and app on the iOS app store are both costs that I am really only willing to pay if there's any amount of community interest in this project. So please, let me know in the comments if ANY part of this project seems interesting to you! Also, if you have any additional ideas to contribute, I plan to update this post with a github link if there's enough interest.