Oasis Gardens' Raspberry Pi-Powered Smart Farming System Shows Its Worth for Mycologists
Project aims to bring smart farming to everyone, "from mushrooms to medicinals — and much much more."
The Oasis Gardens project is looking to bring a little Raspberry Pi smarts to the world of mycology and gardening, putting together a Python-powered open source platform dubbed oasis-grow to help people's green fingers along.
"Smart growing technologies are currently only available to large, well-capitalized agribusiness operations, which places smaller-scale (read: local) growers at a disadvantage in terms of information, labor cost, and potential product quality," the company explains of its still-in-beta creation. "Our goal is to equip growers of all kinds with capabilities previously only available for those with capital to invest or deep technical expertise."
Driven by a Raspberry Pi, infrared camera, and an Arduino Uno, the oasis-grow system is designed to control heat, humidity, airflow, light, and watering cycles in order to put together as friendly an environment as possible for growing all kinds of things — including mushrooms and other fungi.
In a demonstration of the platform's suitability for the latter, posted to Reddit, one developer showcased a prototype build in which the infrared camera is used for monitoring of agar cultures and spawn jars. Temperature and humidity sensors, meanwhile, provide long-term tracking of environmental conditions.
The oasis-grow project is licensed under the permissive Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license, effectively releasing it into the public domain — but its creators are also hoping to commercialize the effort, promising to open a crowdfunding campaign for a polished version of the platform soon.
The source code has been published to GitHub, while more information is available on the Oasis Gardens website.