MycoLog – IoT-Powered Mushroom Cultivation Monitoring

Culinary mushroom cultivation is precision agriculture. Temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels must stay within tight ranges through different growth stages—inoculation, colonization, pinning, and fruiting. A 2-degree temperature swing can delay fruiting by days. High CO2 during pinning produces malformed mushrooms. Low humidity causes drying and contamination.

From my own mushroom cultivation experience, the consistent pain point was clear: manual monitoring is exhausting and error-prone. Checking conditions multiple times daily, often discovering problems too late. Commercial monitoring systems exist but cost $2,000-5,000—prohibitively expensive for hobbyists managing a few fruiting chambers.

The opportunity was clear: build an affordable IoT monitoring solution using low-cost sensors ($20-50 each) integrated with a mobile app. This would democratize professional-grade environmental tracking while pushing the technical boundaries of mobile hardware connectivity.

I evaluated multiple IoT sensor platforms: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensors for close-range monitoring, WiFi sensors for remote access, and hybrid devices supporting both protocols. Each had tradeoffs in cost, battery life, data reliability, and ease of integration with web technologies.

Building the Bluetooth Web API integration proved more complex than expected. Browser compatibility varies significantly—Chrome on Android performs well, Safari on iOS has limitations, and desktop browsers have inconsistent support. I prototyped with multiple sensor models, testing connection stability, data streaming latency, and battery consumption under real grow environment conditions.

The integration is still under active development, working toward reliable streaming of temperature, humidity, and CO2 data from three different sensor types to a single mobile interface—targeting 99.2% data accuracy compared to laboratory-grade reference instruments to validate the technical feasibility of affordable IoT monitoring for agriculture applications.

With reliable sensor data streaming, I designed time-series chart components to visualize environmental conditions over days and weeks. The UX challenge: present enough detail to identify trends and anomalies, without overwhelming users with raw data points. I implemented zoomable charts, growth stage annotations, and color-coded threshold indicators.

Building on Printory's QR code architecture, I added substrate batch tracking. Growers scan QR codes to log inoculation dates, track colonization progress, detect contamination, and record fruiting cycles. This unified environmental monitoring (from sensors) with manual cultivation tracking (via QR codes) in a single mobile interface.

The alert system is a critical planned feature: push notifications when temperature, humidity, or CO2 levels fall outside species-specific optimal ranges. The goal is to catch environmental issues within minutes instead of hours—preventing contamination and improving yields through faster response times.

MycoLog is currently in closed testing with 2 users, with sensor integration under active development. The goal is to validate the core hypothesis: affordable IoT sensors combined with thoughtful mobile app design can deliver professional-grade monitoring at a fraction of commercial system costs.

The project is revealing important lessons about mobile hardware integration. Bluetooth compatibility requires extensive device testing—what works on one platform may behave differently on another. Battery optimization for continuous monitoring is critical; users need days of sensor runtime, not hours, for practical deployment in grow operations.

Most importantly, MycoLog demonstrates the potential of combining reusable component architecture (from Printory) with domain-specific customization and real-time hardware connectivity—pushing mobile apps into agriculture and industrial monitoring applications.