About
Where this came from
I started cultivating in 2022 — spore and liquid culture, grain spawn, bulk substrate, fruiting, harvest — the whole cycle, hands on. In June 2024 I left my job as a data engineer to grow full time. Within a few months the equipment was the bottleneck, not the biology: wall timers, humidifiers that hold a single target, fans with no feedback, and nothing to tell me a tent had drifted until the flush showed it. By November 2024 I was writing the first control code and building prototypes. In January 2025 Myco-Monitor became the full-time job.
Why I could build it
Most people in this space are either growers or engineers. I've done enough of both to know where each one's assumptions break.
Data and Sterility. Several years at Duke University's Division of Laboratory Animal Resources, where aseptic procedure and autoclave operation were the daily standard, and where I earned AALAS certification as an Assistant Laboratory Animal Technician. Working with research animals means a lot of data to log and SOPs to follow. If contamination occurs, or the room's environment drifts, the experiment can fail — and the time and money lost can be significant.
Hardware and diagnostics. Before software I was an automotive technician — AAS from Universal Technical Institute, Ford FACT and BMW STEP factory programs, and ASE certifications in Engine Repair (A1), Electrical/Electronic Systems (A6), and Engine Performance (A8), later working as an NC-licensed vehicle inspector. That's years of tracing electrical faults and keeping equipment running in hot, wet, dirty conditions. A grow room isn't gentler than an engine bay.
Control systems. From 2016 to 2021 I built and flew FPV quadcopters — freestyle and racing, acro mode, on STM32 F4 and F7 flight controllers running Betaflight and iNav with GPS. Building a quad means soldering the board, ESCs, and sensors yourself, then tuning the control loop until it holds a line under load. Get it wrong and the failure is immediate and visible. That's the background behind how the Hyphae controller manages CO₂, humidity, and temperature: a loop that has to hold a target with real hardware, not just log a number.
Embedded systems. At EASi I worked on a team developing embedded systems for Caterpillar construction equipment — regression testing on real hardware with dSpace, and pulling telematics data out of machines that weren't designed to give it up.
Software and data. BS in Computer Science and Business from North Carolina Central University, where I also TA'd C++ for two years. My senior project was an early pass at ag-tech: a Parrot AR drone under PlayStation-controller command, running a small CNN to spot deer in the camera feed, meant to chase them off crops. (Deer, it turns out, don't scare easily. The system worked; the deer didn't cooperate.) After graduating I spent two years as a data engineer at CVS Health through Infosys, running enterprise pipelines on Google Cloud (Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer), finishing the migration three weeks early and landing in Infosys's top 3% of performers globally. Pipelines taught me that the silent failure is the expensive one — that's the thinking behind Myco-Monitor's logging and alerting.
What that looks like in the product
I design the boards (KiCad), write the firmware (ESP32-S3, C++/ESP-IDF), build the dashboard, and model and print the enclosures myself. Outside of 80% of the PCB’s, every part in these products is currently sourced from DigiKey. The devices run fully local — no cloud dependency, no telemetry back to me.
The dashboard software, Mycelium, is open source on GitHub (Myco-Monitor link below). I'll also be publishing the 3D print files for the enclosures, so if a case cracks or breaks you can print a replacement instead of waiting on me.
If you want to check any of this, my full history is on LinkedIn, my personal GitHub, or the Myco-Monitor GitHub pages.