Mushroom Grow Box

In an effort to increase mushroom yield, reduce maintenance, and improve environmental controls such as more stable humidity and fresh air exchange, we applied some basic programming, sensoring, and automation to a large clear tote and created an automated mushroom grow box.

The basic mushroom growing environment uses 3 simple principles and a few electronic components.

Principles:
Cycle small fan to evacuate the air volume of the growbox, and draw fresh air in through a hepa filter.
Sample Humidity every 60 seconds.
Turn on a small fogger/humidifier until a humidity of 85% is achieved.

If this type of work is beyond the scope of your skills or abilities, the same system can be built with less technical components than those listed below. Although it wouldn’t be as precise, you could just use a mechanical timer to cycle a humidifier on and off a every other hour, or 30 minutes, and adjust the frequency and length of time the humidifier is on, based on the health of any mushrooms. Although you would have to open the lid occasionally to let in fresh air, as its important to mushroom growth.

If you want to build our mushroom grow box, with humidity controller, the list of parts and where we sourced them are further below.

If you just want to learn how the absolute basics to the commercial mushroom production/life cycle, check out our article here: Mushroom Life Cycle.

If you want to learn more about controlling AC power with small programmable boards check out our article on that: Real World Arduino Use.

Components:
Arduino (c programmable microcontroller) Really Bare Bones Arduino $12 usd from ebay
Solid State Relay – Used logic level 120-240vac 3-32vdc driven relay $4 usd from ebay
DHT11 Sensor – Humidity and Temperature Sensor $5 usd electronics parts store
Switchable Power Supply – 25$ usd from Best Buy
Fog Machine – $9 usd with cool LEDs from chinese vendor on ebay
18g Clear Tote – $7 usd Wally World
Gang Box – $1 usd Any hardware store
CPU Fan – $2 usd from ebay
Vacuum Cleaner Hepa Filter – $3 usd On clearance at a discount store

Decide to build the mushroom grow box? Send us an email or leave us a comment and we’ll send you the source code we used for the Arduino. It uses a little bit of simple code, as well as the TimeAlarms and DHT11 libraries made for Arduinos.

Written By The Gardenisto

The Gardenisto is passionate about aquaponics, hydroponics, horticulture, and traditional gardening. The Gardenisto shares his knowledge to help other enthusiasts in their own gardening endeavors.

One response to “Mushroom Grow Box”

1. LAN duong says:

   March 25, 2016 at 4:54 pm

   Please send for me source code and circuits map. Thank!

   Reply