Venus Vaporizer

Here is my Vaporizer project!

There weren't any others around here in Finland 2 years ago, only Volcano so I started to build my own, and it seems to work well now, I have never tried other vaporizers but this seems to warm up quick enough, 90 - 120 sec, the vapour is powerful and works very well, I've been too high from 3 hits..and there's full manual control of vaporizing temperature, evenly baked herbs after vaporizing and enough power to burn everything inside if needed (herb, not the vaporizer )

Batteries are LiFePo4, and work very nicely, and it is nice to be able to use vaporizer without any cables connected. The problem I have now is that I don't know what kind of bowl I should have there..I have used now just a cut piece of metal tube, which fits on top of heating element tube, and placed a metal screen inside to hold the herb. But when herb is grounded well, to small particles, they tend to fly out of the bowl when inhaling quickly...so there should be something to keep that from happening. I have now just used a second metal screen, which is just placed over the herbs when the bowl has been filled. But it doesn't feel very professional, and I have been waiting for some great idea to pop in my mind but so far it has not happened and that is why I cannot say that the vaporizer is ready! Of course fully usable, but I would like to have more professional feel to the bowl.



here is the link

www.venusvaporizer.com

Looks nice! Got a couple questions.

What is the price? I saw that there wasn't a price tag anywhere on your site. And how do you load the bowl?...and where is it? Does it come with any warranty?

really need to see this in action. kinda sticks out a bit. looks like a siren light on top a fire truck. but i still would like to see a video about it.

Is it going to have a USB port?

Yeah, there is no price, but $159 is the price. The bowl is not in the pictures, but I have to upload more, maybe tomorrow I can make it. Warranty, of course

Nice! Looking forward to hearing more details about the Venus/

More details would be great. The more vapes on the market the better...as long as they are quality

I'm serious about the USB port. If it's truely a convection device and there's a microcontroller in it i find it would be regrettable not to use this opportunity to offer potential customers a chance to explore a new dimension in vaporization: software-assisted vaporization! At least, lets consider it as an option...

Do you mean like the Zephyr had? What benefit do you see a USB providing, as in what would be it's purpose?

The Zephyr people never really turned their USB port into real value for their technically oriented customers, you're asking me to describe what can be done with a potential resource which has never been explored. The Venus vaporizer is still in its development phase so the time to ask about this rare feature is now - right now!... Later will be too late.



My reasoning behind asking about a USB port involves multiple aspects. One of them is observation: learning depends on it and the acquired knowledge might help clear the way to new avenues some day. I view the USB port as something desirable because we won't know what can be done with a USB port exactly until it's been put in the hands of some curious & creative minds...

I think the USB feature would be good too. Hmm firmware updates maybe, profiles for different vape seshes, simple temp control from PC...

Maybe individual programmable USB vaporizer profiles for different users.

...and there's what we don't know yet:

http://www.fuckcombustion.com/viewtopic.php?pid=92661#p92661

...which might even cause a brand new generation of vaporizers to be launched. Go figure!

I will play devils advocate and suggest a USB port is an utter waste of time and money. It is a vaporizer, what can you really do with a USB port? You are suggesting future purposes that have not been thought of yet. Looks like a nice vape and if you could carry on the glass treatment through the entire air path not just around the heater; for 159.00 it would be a hell of a deal.

What if the manufacturer already happens to be using a USB link to communicate with the microcontroller during the development phase?

I have thought of USB long time ago when designing the vape but I didn't know any really useful purpose for it, except charging batteries..and USB doesn't have much output power, so charging time would be about 8 hours for VenusVaporizer. Firmware updates would be good, with firmware I can change parameters like warmup time, and also add new functions to the controls, but all these would add to the cost of product and for typical user the added value would not be too much, So now there is only one option in software and it seems to work fine. No need to have more fancy things than actually needed..but one idea I had in my mind, is that each user could calibrate the start up / pre-heating time for their own purposes and herbs, now it is just 120 sec with option to stop the full power heating with a press of a button. Tomorrow I will make the video, nothing too special but just to show the idea how it works.

In any case it's a good thing to get the opinion of a developper.

OK, now there is a video, near the bottom of page

http://www.venusvaporizer.com/tuoteen_eng.html

Wow. Bigger than i imagined. But i like it.

I like how the vapor fills the glass. Seems a lot like the Vapolamp in that regard.

How about a glass air path instead of plastic?

Hi VilleKille2,

Watching that video closely i noticed inhalation begins at 1:10, e.g. there's a lapse time of about 10 seconds after the moment when your featured vaporist presses the "Boost" button, at 1:00 exactly. To me it means the vaporizer got that much time to build up a reserve of hot air inside but then i realize the internal structure has yet to be seen. I think the viewers will all be satisfied that your video strongly pleads in favour of convection, this part of the demonstration has been handled very nicely it seems. My bet is that your potential customers might now want to get details about this: how does that particular vaporizer design solve heat retention issues?

Do you mean the final part of airpath, the tube from which you inhale? Yes it is somekind of plastic, from Hospital. It just feels more handy, and durable than for example glass part there, of course also glass tube one could have there as well.

Hi, I think I don't maybe fully understand everything you wrote, but first I have to apologize for some stupid mistakes on making this video, I concentrated so much trying to get some video captured that I forgot to use the vaporizer in normal way First of all, that "herb" had few drops of 100% lavender oil, which seems to be very strong stuff and it vaporized in relatively low temperature, I put it to make it more easy to see visually the production on vapour inside glass, but the problem was that I was unable to inhale this extremely strong vapour, just a mouthful and that's all I was able to do

But back to your message, I don't think that there is much of reserve hot air inside this vaporizer. I mean, when it is normally used, with known herb and known pre-heating time, it just works, I can just let it warm up, and only then install this bowl, or I can install bowl before pre-heating, works anyway, but sometimes I feel that the freshest vapours with all terpenes can be enjoyed when I install bowl when it is all ready hot. Then it takes about 10 extra seconds to be ready, I guess the bowl absorbs some heat energy and that is the reason for this extra time. But when the vapour starts to flow, you can inhale as much as you can fit to your lungs, and the vapour keeps coming, so the hot air doesn't come from any reserve, it is heated on the fly. There is the tube inside the unit, from which you can see the upper part, the one where the light comes from and the bowl sits on top of it. It is custom made and inside this is fitted the bulb on ceramic base, and I don't have any exact numbers but I suspect that the glass of this bulb gets very hot, and the heat warms up the tube. I have measured, that when the vaporizing temperature is right and I get perfect results, the tube is about 140 degrees, but the bulb inside is probably more than 300 degrees, depending on the power dial, so once the warm up period is over, there is energy stored in form of heat of the tube, and the heating element/bulb will warm up the air when it is travelling past it, and also the strong IR radiation which is reflecting all the time inside the tube, warms up air molecules. That's how I think it, but the main point is that it seems to work very well in real. First I made prototypes with a bulb of half the power of this one, and it worked also but with the extra power the heat up times have been reduced, and it is possible to inhale quickly very much and this vaporizer will be able to handle it.

Boost button action is not required, actually I rarely use it myself as I have learned to control it with the power dial only, without thinking too much. The point of Boost-button is to make it easy for novices to use, basically this is how it is supposed to be used:
1. Let the vaporizer warm up the 2 minutes
2. press boost, and suck air/vapour from the tube and release boost.

The power dial one doesn't need to touch at all when doing like this, I think about 25-30% power position is good for normal use. This way the vaporizer stays in hot temps but doesn't burn material even if you don't inhale for sometime, and I programmed the microcontroller to sense this 3 times pressing of boost-button, to turn it off, because this way you don't have to turn the power wheel after you have found a nice position for your needs, and you can repeat your vaporizing experience always without any adjustments.

But you can also just turn the power to 0% and it turns off in 6 seconds. Also there is safety function, to prevent accidental turn on in your bag etc. controlled with the power wheel.

But this question: how does that particular vaporizer design solve heat retention issues? I don't understand what it means.

Hi VilleKille2,

As far as i'm concerned the lavender oil setup conveniently illustrated one aspect i was most curious about, i mean is it or is it not a convection device and it seems to me that the answer is, most definitely, yes! Although i can't tell if the movement of heated air in the vaporization chamber creates sufficient turbulence to cause recirculation i'm confident it's appropriate to conclude that hot air does pass through the vegetal matter. In my mind, that fact alone fully justifies the existence of that specific video but veteran vaporists may think otherwise, i wonder. My opinion is that as a potential buyer i'd say this particular topic is covered and i got a proper answer.



Thank you for providing information about the heat source, i'm sure the future Venus users will be proud to tell their friends that they own a vaporizer which works like a mini Oracle or a mini AroMed but for a fraction of the cost only - not to mention it's portable!!! I suppose you're quite right about thermal retention, there's certainly some in the lamp's glass itself and digital regulation compensates for what might be missing otherwise. Too bad we can't get data plots though, i would have loved to see your vaporizer's curves...



Finally, i'm glad you brought the focus on that "Power" button because there's another question on my mind... You see, i'm also curious about Salvia Divinorum (it's still being sold legally in my country as of this writing). Salvia is said to require a relatively higher vaporization temperature when compared to cannabis so i must ask you this: how much "boost" can one get in terms of absolute temperature?



In any case, i wish you well with this stimulating project!

Here new video, which shows the complete process, real time video with the 2 minute preheating period. After these hits which are shown on the video, I almost OD'd

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aNQpeMiYI4