Fungiculture: Oyster Mushrooms

It has been a while since I’ve been able to post an actual update, having gotten a job, moved, and settled in during the interim. Having met with some small success growing a few basil plants indoors, I decided to branch out into mycoculture, or mushroom growing, as the requirements are a bit stricter, supplying a bit of an engineering challenge in getting it right. While it’s totally true that, given my choice of oyster mushrooms (pleurotus ostreatus) for my first attempt, I could have just as well used a plastic bag and a spray bottle, however that would not have scratched my data-gathering/total automation itch. Now let us get to the admittedly over-kill list of parts I ended up using.

During this first week-long time lapse we kept the aquarium light on continuously to provide consistent illumination for the camera, and realized that consistent (and blue) light strongly inhibits mushroom growth, which turns out to be a well-established fact  so for a week we saw very little happen aside from a moderate whitening of the surface of the mycelium-log. After a week of watching, we folded and decided to shut it down for the evening and go to bed. Of course, finally given a break from the light, mushrooms immediately appeared over night, so we excitedly resumed the time-lapse capture the following morning, resulting in the second video.

First week, under constant illumination (not much change)


Second week, without night illumination

By the end of that week we had a full flush of mushrooms to harvest, as shown in the photos below. I probably waited about a half-day too long, given that the cap-edges were just slightly beginning to droop. After cutting them from the base with a kitchen knife, the heights and cap-widths were measured for later comparison, and the rinsed mushrooms were stir-fried with green onion and garlic! They were pretty tasty! Given that I don’t usually eat mushrooms I was surprised by how much I liked them, but the inevitable bias towards something I made myself can only help. I also managed to log the conditions over the first 12 days (missing the last bit of the fruiting stage before harvesting); those data are shown below. The placement of the two sensors probably makes up for the fact that the controller was reporting ~70% RH while the logger reported values around ~60%, but there are some relatively easy calibration tests that can be done.


Mushrooms_humidity Mushrooms_temperature
Plots of the temperature and humidity as a function of time over the first 12 days.Without further delay, I should show off the fruits (kinda) of my labor, the mushrooms!

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Rather than use this as a one-off experiment, I’ve already got the tank back under humidity control and monitoring, the first beginnings of a new flush of mushrooms are just now showing themselves. Moving forward I might try to simplify the setup, as I’ve read that environmental monitoring and power control are super-easy with cheap single-board computers (e.g. raspberry pi). It’s only coincidence that I’ve been playing with those lately for other project, just 4 years behind the curve!

Publication: Designing spectrum-splitting dichroic filters to optimize current-matched photovoltaics

After an incredibly long wait, and with an incredibly long title, the paper covering my work on thin film filters for solar energy collection is finally in print! You can find the it here as part of OSA's Applied Optics Journal.

If there's interest in a plain-English explanation of what we did and why, I'd definitely take the time to write one up! Just drop a comment below.