I’m a hobbyist, not a professional developer, who enjoys tinkering with IoT, home automation, and environmental monitoring. When a friend started a mushroom growing operation in Nevada, I offered to handle the tech side.
I knew (and still know) next to nothing about growing mushrooms. But I do know how to get a sensor to talk to a dashboard. So the deal was simple: he grows, I wire.
The goal was to monitor and control everything from a dashboard on his cell phone.
The grow operation lives in two insulated shipping containers parked side by side, with a sliding door cut in to connect them:
Shipping containers are great for mushrooms. For WiFi, they’re basically a Faraday cage. More on that below.
For remote access, the dashboard is reached through RemoteRED. It works well and can also send notifications. I use Tailscale when I need to get in and do remote programming.
Nearly everything talks MQTT, so most of this could be ported to Home Assistant if you prefer that route.
I started out with Mycodo as the control platform. It turned out to be overkill: this setup doesn’t need PID control or other fancy functions, and the dashboards and controls didn’t translate well to a phone screen. So I moved everything to Node-RED. Claude helped with much of the automation logic and the functions needed for the changeover.
Power. The Pi 4 sits in a weather-resistant box in the lab. It shares that box with a MeanWell 5V/5A power supply, which has cables run to the ESP32 sensor boxes throughout the containers. That means no USB power bricks sitting out in the humidity and spores. (Spores get everywhere.)
WiFi. Most of the sensors and smart plugs are on WiFi, so an Ethernet-connected GL.iNet router serves as an access point. The Pi is also wired to Ethernet.
Then my friend noticed that some devices in the fruiting container dropped off whenever he closed the sliding metal door. The fix was a second access point (TP-Link RE705X) in the pre-conditioning room. Lesson learned: metal doors are very good at their job.
LoRa. As an experiment for future expansion around the farm, I built LoRa-based sensor packs (SCD41 CO₂ / temperature / humidity). They report to a LoRa/WiFi receiver. So far, LoRa gets through the metal containers just fine.
There’s always another sensor to add. 🍄