Senseair supports sustainable urban agriculture - Mushroom farming
The startup “Hut&Stiel” uses Senseairs S8 CO2 sensor under extreme conditions to control their production parameters when used coffee grounds are turned into edilbe mushroom.
Their idea was simply to collect the used coffee grounds in cargobikes and put it in bags together with mushroom seed and other ingredients. After 3-4 weeks they harvested fresh oyster mushroom they now supply viennese fine restaurants with.
The challenges of sustainable production:
For harvesting the perfect fruit, the bags have to be kept in an optimal range of temperature, moisture and levels of CO2. During breeding the mycelium gets “fever”, drinks a lot and emits CO2 that has to be monitored. Here Senseair stepped in and provided their genuine sensor - Senseair S8 - to the young startup.
The design:
In a nutshell they tinkered a series of ESP32 based sensor-nodes that hook on a local WLAN to transmit the CO2 data every 5 minutes to a Raspberry PI using the MQTT protocol. Each of the sensor was also equipped with a big display to make the data easily available on spot.
The young startup “Hut&Stiel” say "We loved the sensor Sensair S8 a lot from start as of its maintenance-free long-term stability and super easy handling. We also learned to keep hands off cheap replicas of the sensor as they don´t really work as reliable as the original is from Senseair" .
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Author, Robert Kotal