Under-canopy lighting, affordable automation, and an electric joint filter you can fill up with concentrates
Walking the floor of NECANN can be disorienting and thrilling at once. Especially if you’re looking for cool new technology. This year’s convention featured more than a dozen robots at work, jarring practice dabs or infusing, rolling, and packaging joints. Meanwhile, cannabis brands of all sizes offered swag and samples, while hardware companies showed off new devices like two-gram vapes with bright branding.
Inspired to poke around the buzzing trade show floor, we checked out several gadgets and machines that caught our eye this past weekend, including a compact flower sorter, an e-filter for concentrates, and an innovative lighting design that supercharges plant growth.
EFLO
Billed as the “world’s first electric filter tip,” EFLO started developing this new age add-on for old-fashioned joints around two-and-a-half years ago, and officially launched at MJ BizCon last December. Since then, the company’s brand ambassador Christian Hannawa said they have been pushing the new vaporizer/filter in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, while starting to take orders in nine US states.
“Since we only launched five months ago, everything is made to order, so it’s about a 45-to-60- day lead time, and people are just now getting their product,” Hannawa said. He said the idea for the EFLO was born out of frustration after the company tried to launch a line of infused donuts, joints, and blunts. “We just tried to make it clean and new,” he added, “a way for someone to experience a joint with a little bit of infusion.”
Proximity Lighting
If you have any interest in growing cannabis, you’ve likely heard praise for “under-canopy lighting” of late. Adding additional light to help boost grows might seem intuitive, but engineers have started creating new rigs utilizing under and side canopy lighting for growers, leading to larger yields in the range of 25%.
“We partnered with the Clemson Cannabis Research Coalition to study any differences between more top lighting and side lighting, which showed a 20% increase in yield and 27% increase in the size of the grade of bud,” Proximity founder Scott Eddins said. “So that was kind of a landmark study that showed that it was the distribution of light across the surface area of the plant versus just more light.”
Eddins said that he was first inspired to create these new systems in 2018, after a client asked him to design lighting for an “indoor patrolled environment” for hops. Following that experience, one of the principals invited him to a cannabis facility in Seattle to explore solving the same problem for cannabis. Among other companies, Proximity has recently partnered with Green Thumb Industries, which Eddins said is seeing a competitive advantage.
Gram Master
Michael Bartrom has been developing automated machines for decades, but started Groen Automation to combine his love for cannabis and engineering in 2018. Traveling to Boston from Indiana for NECANN, he brought his Gram Master to show for smaller growers who run tight operations.
“You put a bulk flower in the top of the machine, it conveys it to these scales, and then the computer combines the scales to make the perfect bag or the perfect jar,” Bartrom explained. “This machine reduces this job to one person so that the owners can make some money. When I got in and talked to people and understood where most of these farmers are coming from, this is the machine that they need. Something that they can afford. And it’s reliable. It’s not so automated that they can’t figure it out.”
Bartrom said the first Gram Master is currently in operation in Michigan, and that he helped bring the second one to Massachusetts for Harbor House Collective. At the time of our interview, he had deposits on two more.
