Who’s writing this

The short version

I’m a retired software developer. Growing is a hobby I finally have time to do properly. I built a device that reads my own tent and gives advice, and I wrote the Answers pages while working out what is actually known about growing cannabis versus what merely gets repeated.

I am not a botanist and I have never worked in horticulture. That is exactly why every page here names its sources. You should not be taking my word for any of it, and with the papers listed you do not have to.

The thirty-five years

Most of my career was as a government contractor — Army, Marines, State Department, Labor Department, Postal Service, Census Bureau. I worked in the State Department’s Executive Secretariat for decades, and the work I’m proudest of is the systems I wrote for the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, translating Russian on nuclear treaty documents. Anyone who worked with me will remember I was big on automated testing, build pipelines and architectural patterns.

Most of that has nothing to do with a grow tent. One part carries straight over: for thirty-five years I built systems where the record had to hold up when nobody takes your word for it. That is the same instinct behind a device that writes down every reading it takes and every decision it makes, and keeps them where you can read them back.

Why I built the device

When I retired I was tired of the meetings and the schedules, but I was having more fun making software than at any point in my career, because of AI. So I quit the job and kept making systems. Growing was the hobby sitting right there, and there are sites with AI built in that will help you — but they are in the cloud, and you have to upload your grow to them first. I live in a state where growing is legal. It still is not legal federally.

So I went and learned Edge AI, and built a device that works only on the local network: cameras and sensors inside the tent, the analysis running on the box, nothing leaving the house. The advice it gives comes from published literature — a controlled-environment cannabis textbook and the peer-reviewed papers around it — with every claim kept next to the source it came from.

The longer version of that story, wrong turns included, is on the blog. The first grow is on the record, including the stretch where the device held the air right on target and the plant got sick anyway.

Why the Answers pages exist

Building something that gives cultivation advice meant I had to go and find out which advice was actually supported. The gap between what is published and what gets repeated turned out to be wide, and in a few places the popular answer is the opposite of the measured one. The pages are what I found, with the sources named so you can check my work.

Where the research is thin or missing, the page says so instead of filling the space with confident-sounding advice. A practice with no evidence behind it is not necessarily wrong — you just deserve to know which kind you are following.

What I’m selling, stated plainly

I build Croplock and I intend to sell it. There is no payment path on this site yet — the first units are going to a small cohort before anything goes on sale — but the commercial interest is real, and you should weigh what you read here accordingly.

The Answers pages are written to be useful whether or not you ever buy anything from me. Most of them end in something you can do yourself this afternoon, with what you already own.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, or you know the paper I could not find, I would like to hear about it: admin@croplock.com. The places where a page admits the evidence runs out are the places I would most like to be corrected.

The research pages are at Answers. The build log is on the blog. The device itself is at croplock.com, and if you want to hear when it is ready you can join the waitlist.