Grolia: firmware, touchscreen and online store for a mushroom-growing cabinet
Flush is a benchtop cabinet that grows gourmet mushrooms from fruiting blocks. Steve Richardson, the founder of Wahlu Labs, co-founded Grolia and is its Director of Software and UX. He built the firmware that runs the climate control, the touchscreen on the front of every cabinet, and grolia.com.au, where people buy cabinets and blocks.
- Relationship
- Steve’s work as Grolia’s co-founder and Director of Software and UX
- When
- 2023 to now
- Platforms
- Firmware, Touchscreen, Web
- Live
- grolia.com.au
The product
Flush holds one or two fruiting blocks and keeps the temperature, humidity and fresh air where each mushroom variety needs them. Owners pick a variety preset and the cabinet holds those conditions.
Grolia’s Kickstarter campaign was funded in seven minutes. Flush v5 is the first production version. Grolia’s Oliver Kleyn designed the cabinet and Ben Schaeffer its electronics. Steve wrote the software that runs on it and around it.
Firmware
The firmware is written in C++ for a Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller with Wi-Fi. It reads the carbon dioxide, temperature and humidity sensors and drives the fans, humidifier, Peltier cooling and lights to hold each variety’s targets.
- A small supervisor runs separately from the main app, so updates download in the background, are checked, and can roll back if an install fails.
- Releases are signed and delivered over the air, so cabinets get fixes without going back to the workshop.
Touchscreen
Every cabinet has a 320 × 480 touchscreen. Owners choose a variety preset, adjust targets by hand, connect to Wi-Fi, pair the cabinet with their account and install updates. The interface has light and dark themes.
grolia.com.au
In July 2026 Steve moved Grolia off Shopify and a separate device app onto one Next.js platform. It handles the public site, the shop, customer accounts and the staff admin.
- A shop with twenty mushroom varieties, and a quiz that helps people work out whether Flush suits them.
- Stripe checkout with buy-now-pay-later options, and fruiting-block subscriptions delivered every one to eight weeks.
- Customer accounts with orders, subscriptions and a dashboard for each paired cabinet.
- A staff admin for orders, products, customers, shipping and manufacturing.
- Block orders sent automatically to the supplier’s fulfilment system.
- Transactional email, Mailchimp sync and an interactive 3D model of the cabinet on the homepage.
Built with
- C++
- Arduino and PlatformIO
- Raspberry Pi RP2350
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Fastify
- MongoDB Atlas
- Google Cloud Run
- Stripe
- AWS SES
- Mailchimp
- three.js
