Welcome to the blog part of the site!

26/02/2023

I am sorry for taking so long to update, it was hard putting this into words. I hope that you can understand why I had to make this update a bit more personal.

09/01/2023

Happy new year everyone, I really enjoyed going back to my hometown for the holidays.

So here’s where we’re at with the project, thanks to all of your generous donations we can order the mushroom growing kit, this is the one I decided on. Thanks to a member on the discord I remembered that I can simply order from amazon Italy, which is far cheaper! Once the grow kit comes I’ll take measurements and order the printed circuit board in accordance to that.

So the order has been placed and it will probably arrive in Greece around the 17th of January. In the meantime there’s going to be a small hiatus so that I can focus on finals, activity on the blog will resume once the kit arrives.

Consider joining the discord as I most likely will be checking it a couple times a day and you can ask me things, or you can more easily see when the blog updates.

Thank you all for supporting me thus far let's make this year a productive one!

"Let the year of the fungus begin!" -Fungimancer Anon

22/12/2022

I’m back! So let’s not waste anymore time and get down to business. I have been considering which items would be the right ones to buy with the money that has been donated to me and have reached a couple conclusions.

First is the type of fungus that we will use for this project which is some type of oyster mushroom I came to this conclusion by taking into account that most of the experiments in this field were conducted using them so to avoid complications and to maximize the chances of getting results I have decided that this is the best course of action. This /A/rticle from nature magazine was a big deciding factor for me. Now I still haven’t found where to buy the kit from as there are none in Greece, and I also haven’t decided which type of oyster mushroom I am going to buy but I’ll decide that in due time.

Second, after talking with the professor that could have helped a bit it was decided that since I am trying to replicate the method that is used to make neurons talk with circuits I should simply get printed circuit boards similar to those, which means no lead and gold coated. The circuit boards will be ordered after the grow kit has arrived so that I can measure it and make the design files for the boards accordingly.

This is it for now, I can’t really do much until we get those materials required to continue. So in the meantime I’ll be trying to redesign the site a bit.

"Merry Fungal Christmass" -Fungimancer Anon

13/12/2022

Well it finally happened the poll ended with 67% in favour of me making a Ko-Fi(I sold out). I had prepared for both scenarios so a couple days before the end of the poll I made a small blog post on Ko-Fi.

Right now the current goal is to finance the printed circuit boards that will be required and will cost around 20 euro. I do not plan to neglect the site in favour of Ko-Fi nor do I think it makes sense to add paywalls for a project that is as community focused as this one. As a result all blog posts after this one will be also uploaded to Ko-Fi as well as the site.

If someone on Ko-Fi thinks they should get something exclusive for supporting I'd be glad to hear them out. At the bottom of the site I have added a button that will take you to my Ko-Fi.

"I am once again asking for your financial support" -Fungimancer Anon

11/12/2022

Doing something I haven’t really done before on here and updating the blog in quick succession. This post is more closely related to the technical aspects of this project unlike the last one that was more focused on financing and the small site restructuring.

Firstly I would like to thank Sui (owner of Genosadness on Neocities) on the discord for making the cute Fungimancy gif that I’ve added to the footer of the site along with the visitor counter.

Now let’s get back to the stuff that actually moves the project along. A couple of you might remember that I was going to talk with the teacher that showed some interest in the project and who also gave me free access to the computer lab that happens to have a lot of testing equipment that I will attempt to use in the future to collect data that isn’t actual trash, I tried asking him what kind of pcb traces would be considered safe for medical use.

Unfortunately he told me that he has no clue but a fellow classmate did point out to me that we have a professor that teaches tech in biology or something along those lines and I suppose that’s the next thread of hope that I can hang on to for this project. Since if he shows a lot of interest in the proof of concept chances are that he might provide assistance even if it’s something simple like telling me what’s safe for medical use, it would be of huge help since it would reduce the amount of things I need to look into by a lot.

"Two steps forward one step back" -Fungimancer Anon

10/12/2022

Well we’re near the end of the poll’s duration and I think it would do some good to clear a couple things up.

Just because there’s only those 2 options it doesn’t mean I’m not considering others, like how one anon proposed I try to get sponsors, ads are most likely not going to happen and even if they did I would try to keep them as non intrusive as possible. I have made an account for ad revenue and an account on Ko-Fi so I can add them to the site almost instantly.

At the time of writing the vote is 50/50 so I’m a bit excited to see the result come Monday 12th of December.

I have also updated the reading material part of the site with a couple extra parameters I might use and also all the new resources I have received from an anon. In case you sent me a link and I didn’t add it to the links tab you can send it again or I’ll explain why I didn’t add it.

"Stay fungal" - Fungimancer Anon"

P.S. Sorry for forgetting to sign off last time.

5/12/2022

Entropy, a universal constant that we are alway trying to circumvent, everything eventually falls to entropy such is the one true universal law that applies to all things.

Sorry for being a bit melodramatic but recent developments in the project have left me a bit unmotivated, most saddening of which was something I was expecting to happen, the mushroom jar has been contaminated with mold so it has become useless.

And second is that the cost to manufacture the printed circuit board that would be required to start some proper testing is also currently out of my budget. Basically these two facts have put the project on hold till I can find a solution.

Well truth be told the solution is simple, acquire more capital for the project, to be able to do things in a more proper and controlled manner. And here is where you guys come in. I have made a poll with three options as to how to monetize part of the project to be able to develop it faster and more easily.

• The first option is adding ads to the website and using the small amount of cash that it will generate to be able to invest all of it back into the project.
• The second option is making a Patreon or something similar for people to donate if they’d like a small amount of cash, but personally this option makes me slightly uncomfortable since I’ll be managing other people’s money.
• The third option is marked “Other” where through the discord or the chatbox on the site you can give me other ideas as to what else I could possibly do. But do keep in mind that I am trying my best to get through university so getting several jobs is out of the question.

The poll will last a week and I'll announce the results both on the site and the discord on the 12th of December when it is scheduled to end.

25/11/2022

A promise made is a promise kept, today's blog update is simple yet very important. I'll be showing you what my little DIY projects to help advance this proof of concept that I am working on look like, so you can all get an idea of just how low budget everything is.

Let's start with my DIY oscilloscope, it's not much to look at in fact it's very bad but it did only cost me 8 euro to build and for what it's worth the alternatives would cost me close to 50 euro, so I'm happy that it works at all.

Second let's take a look at how I'm trying to grow fungi on an extreme budget. It's a simple used peanut butter jar with coconut based soil that I added hot water to so that it would kill most things in there, then I added a couple pieces of button mushroom, lastly I put painters tape over the lid so that the fungi could breathe but few things could enter and contaminate the grow medium. And as you can see in the third image mycelium is starting to grow! Once mycelium is visible from all sides of the jar I'll scale up to a bigger container.

This whole proof of concept is going to involve a lot of waiting on my end so updates might be slow, even still I'm sorry for not being as active as I'd personally like on here, between me getting sick and other things that were happening at the same time I didn't give this whole project the attention that I believe it deserves.

"I'm BACK!" -Fungimancy Anon

23/11/2022

Ok it's been a minute since I last updated the blog so here's where I'm at right now, I am sick, but also starting to feel better so expect a proper big update tomorrow where I'll mostly be talking about the steps I've taken and where I need user feedback. Don't expect anything huge for now, but I'll have a couple more images so you can see just how barebones what I have is.

P.S. I'll be moving the links from the side bar to their own page to give them some room to breathe.

"See you tomorrow" -Fungimancy Anon

17/11/2022

Hello everyone, fungimancy anon back with some cool little improvements to the oscilloscope. Apparently the reason why the pi pico wasn't sending a more consistent data stream(See Figure 1), was as I remembered because of something with the power on the board, however it wasn't the PWM controller but the power supply itself as mentioned in this video by GreatScott all I needed to do was tell the board to send power to pin 23 to get better results(See figure 2)

The data I'm getting is still noisy as hell but it's at least far more consistent, this will probably not be how I end up measuring current in the mushrooms though as I happened to remember a sensor that can, if I recall measure currents from a distance I'll update you on whether I can find it or not in my next post which will also have more images and will be about starting the process of growing mushrooms

"See you soon" -Fungimancy Anon

14/11/2022

So let's start with introductions, I am fungimancy anon from /x/ you guys from that biopunk thread probably remember me. I love mushrooms and find them extremely interesting.

Since you last heard from me I've done a couple ghetto experiments using my DIY oscilloscope made from a raspberry pi pico.I tried to see if I can detect the electrical current in mold however i was unsuccesful, at the same time I think mold is out of my scope for now as it isn't a true fungus, I read an article that described the similarity between mold and fungi kind of like the similarities between manities and humans, so they're technically similar biologicaly but they're distinct species (at least that's what I got from it.) Putting that tangent aside I noticed that my oscilloscope's serial output had a bit too much noise, which i think has something to do with the pi pico's pwm controller. Lastly I plugged the oscilloscope probes into a store bought mushroom but I didn't see anything that would support my findings, as the output was very noisy in nature.

So from my first experiment I've come to these conclusions. Firstly it would appear that mycelial caps (which are what we usually think of when we buy mushrooms) aren't gonna give me much data if I don't also have the rest of mycelium attached which makes sense, considering how a hand without the brain to tell it to move isn't gonna do much. To that end I'm probably going to attempt to start a colony of mycelium from some pieces I've kept from the store-bought stuff.Second I need to improve my ability to collect data as much as possible and to do that I'll have to figure out how to improve the serial signals I recieve even a tiny bit.

And with that, that's all for now, pretty anticlimactic I know but that's usually how things are early on in proofs of concept.

"FOR THE FUNGUS FUELED FUTURE THAT I CRAVE!!!!!" -Fungimancy Anon