Kyle Gabriel's Raspberry Pi-Powered Mycodo Keeps an Eye on Mushroom Cultivation
"From foraging to fruiting," this guide will get you cultivating your own mushrooms in a monitored and controlled environment in no time.
Maker and mycologist Kyle Gabriel has showcased a Raspberry Pi-powered mushroom cultivation system running his own software, Mycodo — in a video which covers the process "from foraging to fruiting."
"I walk through the process from foraging wild mushrooms," Gabriel explains of his video, which accompanies a detailed blog post, "developing a laminar flow hood and environmental control chamber, performing aseptic and culturing techniques, and growing and fruiting mushrooms, with a delicious ending."
Gabriel's project runs right from scratch, detailing not only the components required but the tools too. The mushroom enthusiast audience is walked through building a laminar flow hood from plywood and rails with a fan and HEPA filter, the required isolation and culture materials, a base cultivation system, and the real meat of the project: a Raspberry Pi Zero W running the Mycodo software.
"Each growth stage often requires specific environmental conditions for initiation and to grow optimally," Gabriel explains. "The most influential conditions are air temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration. These growth cycle changes are often a natural response to the change in seasonal conditions that promote producing mushrooms. By harnessing this knowledge, we can optimize conditions to promote specific growth stages."
"To do this, we will rely on sensors to measure our environmental conditions and relays to control devices to modulate these conditions, then create feedback loops with these inputs and outputs to regulate conditions to our desired state. The hardware is inexpensive off-the-shelf components and the software is a custom environmental control system I developed, Mycodo, and is free and open source."
The finished project offers live and time-lapse footage of the mushrooms' growth through a Raspberry Pi Camera Module, as well as live readouts of environmental conditions — and alerts via email if the humidity begins to drop too low to sustain the mushrooms under cultivation. Gabriel has even included advice on foraging for wild mushrooms to grow — and a recipe for fried oyster mushrooms, just to finish off.
The full build guide is available on Gabriel's website, while the video is up on YouTube now. Mycodo, meanwhile, has been published to GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.
