The Cave BOX
The Cave Box is now available! Click here to be taken to the shop page.
The easiest way to make your own automated mushroom fruiting chamber.
The Cave Box is an easy to use and affordable way to keep your mushrooms happy. It regulates the humidity in your chamber and keeps the air fresh, so your mushrooms can breathe. The Cave Box simply bolts onto the side of a plastic box, tent or mini greenhouse, turning it into an easy to use and highly configurable mushroom fruiting chamber.
I designed the Cave Box to be reliable, repairable, easy to use and simple to modify; attach it to a tub, fill it up with water and switch it on. It will make the perfect home for all your mushroom growing projects.
The Cave Box has many preset options for the most commonly grown varieties of mushroom, including Lions Mane, Oysters and Reish. It also comes with an option specifically designed to initiate pinning (the formation of baby mushrooms). If you’d enjoy experimenting with your Cave Box, you can precisely control the relative humidity and number of fresh air exchanges, then save your customisations to the device. The Cave Box offers plenty of options for mushroom cultivators to play with.
The Cave Box is affordable enough for hobbyists and small farms to buy., It is made from off-the-shelf parts wherever possible. Any other parts are designed, manufactured and sold by one person. There are no middle men, nor shareholders who take their cut.
There is no enclosure sent with the Cave Box. You can fit it to whatever tub or tent you already have, or can pick up from a local shop. This saves you money on postage, as well as giving you the freedom to upgrade your grow space in whatever way you like.
I invite you to tinker. The code that runs the device is extensible and open source. I’ve included spare connections on the circuit board, so that you can easily modify the Cave Box. For example you could wire them up to control the lights in your grow room, or add a buzzer that sounds when the water needs refilling. It even comes with the hardwire for wifi and bluetooth, allowing you to build a ‘smart home’ for your mushrooms. (Please note that at this time this isn’t a feature of the basic Cave Box device. I intend to release a software update sometime in the future, adding wireless control to the Cave Box.)
It is repairable. The Cave Box uses readily available components where possible. For anything that is custom made, I will sell replacement parts at a reasonable price. If for any reason I no longer sell the parts, I will make the project completely open source, sharing files for the circuit board and 3D printed parts allowing anyone to make a Cave Box for free.
Sholto's Workshop 