Mushroom Fruiting Chamber Controller
Introduction: Mushroom Fruiting Chamber Controller
Growing your own gourmet mushrooms at home can be a satisfying hobby, you can purchase 'ready to fruit' kits, or make your own, and depending on where you live you can have enough natural humidity to grow/fruit mushrooms in your kitchen. Where I live is not humid enough to do this, so I needed to make a Fruiting Chamber (FC) where I could supply my mycelium blocks the right conditions to make lovely edible mushrooms.
My experience with Arduino allowed me to realise how effective an arduino controlled, automated 'tub' Fruiting Chamber could be - especially when I searched AliExpress and found the tiny little 5V donut foggers. To fruit mushrooms, you need high Relative Humidity (RH), and Fresh Air Exchange (FAE), so a box, a fogger, and a fan, with a little arduino controller on the side, plus a year or two of tweaking led me to this current version I'd like to share with you all in my very first Instructable.
I have been running this chamber for a couple of years, upgrading slightly along the way, but with a very messy prototype controller that was not at all photogenic - so I made a new tidier one for this instructable.
Supplies
You will need the following Parts:
* 60-100L (16-26 gallon?) Tote/Tub plastic storage container with lid for the main Fruiting Chamber
* Lunchbox (2L / 67oz) type lunchbox for the controller box
* 5V donut fogger - get spares when you order these! they have a lifespan, so have spares ready.
* 5V fan
* Arduino nano
* Arduino nano Terminal Block (optional, but quite nice)
* DS18B20 temperature sensor, and 4.7kΩ resistor
* Potentiometer, size isn't really important
* 2-channel or 4-channel relay block (only 2x channels used, but leaves room for expansion getting the 4ch unit)
* USB plugs and sockets to cut up - I sacrificed a couple rather useless 4-port hubs for their parts
* Terminal blocks, wires, and header wires
* Plywood (I used 4mm) to mount the components
* A few small woodscrews to mount the components to the plywood
* 16mm glands (x2) for the wires coming in and going out of the controller box
* A couple small (M6) bolts/nuts to secure the lunchbox to the main tub
* A basic Temperature/Humidity display is handy to check periodically, but optional
I got most of the electronic bits from AliExpress, you may have better options in your country.
The Tools you will need are:
* A drill, drill bits. Those stepper bits are great for cutting the right sized holes into the lunchbox
* Hole Saw
* Glue Gun
* Wire Strippers (I use a craft knife and side cutters)
* Craft knife, and side cutters
* Small flat blade screwdriver
* Soldering Iron, and solder (possibly optional, I needed this to put new wires on the USB plugs and sockets)
The program to load into the Arduino can be found here:
Step 1: Prepare Controller Box
Mounting the components onto plywood makes it a whole lot easier to work out of the lunchbox, so I recommend you do this - you can always ignore my advice and chuck everything loose into the box like I did with my prototype though!
I cut the plywood to the rough rectangular size I needed for my lunchbox, then cut the corners off, and rounded off with a rough file (rasp). This really doesn't need to be pretty, it just has to fit into the bottom of the lunchbox.
I then drilled the holes for the cable glands into the lunchbox side. 120
I opted for input wires on the right, and outputs (USB sockets) on the left. These plastic boxes love to crack when being drilled. I used a stepper drillbit with a piece of scrap wood behind the plastic to support it when drilling. Sometimes it was safe to hold the wood with my hands, sometimes I needed to clamp the wood to do it. Take your time to figure out the best way for you to do this.
Mounting the components on the plywood took has to take into consideration where the wires need to go, and you might notice that I moved my arduino UP a bit from these early photos in the final one because I realised that I couldn't plug the USB serial monitor cable into the arduino when it was low. If you copy what I've done you shouldn't have to make the same mistakes I did... 611