I do have my own fruiting chamber, but it's not necessary.
The main advantage of this thing (which is no small feat!) is that it looks pretty, unlike a mottled plastic bag, potentially with another bag over it. I can absolutely see a place for it as a fun, living table piece that gives you food. Also once you buy this thing you have an incentive to keep buying their blocks. I have never been impressed with "smart" fruiting chambers -- they just play up how ~hard~ growing mushrooms is and then do the easy part for you and claim it's solved.
Call me when a chamber like this can detect mold better than my nose and eyes. THAT I'll shell out money for. It sucks to have mold sporulate, contaminating everything, before you know it's happened.
Mushrooms want to grow! And once you've gotten to the point where they're the only thing growing, you're golden.
Also, none of this is that hard if you read and learn! The mushrooms will tell you exactly where you went wrong, and there's TONS of info out there to get the hobby grower started. I highly suggest Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Paul Stamets, and reading up on The Shroomery (lot of good stuff in the gourmet forum, some stuff that's common between gourmet and magic, like agar or grain prep is in the other cultivation forum).
The utility of this device is extremely questionable, but I can't deny that it's really pretty and a good conversation starter.
However, this is relatively simple and cheap to do at home — especially using a technique called uncle Ben’s tek. As it happens, pre-packaged rice is the perfect sterile environment for mycelium growth.
Once successfully inoculated, it’s basically a matter of mixing the mycelium with substrate (wood chips or coir depending on the strain) in a container with a lid that allows minimal airflow (a plastic tub for example) and waiting.
The process is really quite simple, and I’ve harvested kilograms of mushrooms with an initial outlay of around $30. Once you have mushrooms, you have spores, and the recurring cost is only substrate (and uncle Ben’s bags or grains, jars, pressure cooker if you want to sterilise them yourself).
Most of the cleanliness is overblown. It makes sense if you are running a commercial operation, selling a starter, but less important if you can tolerate some failures.
I had a friend who grew 20x 5 gallon buckets at a time and this was is process:
1) Boil grain and and put it in mason jars in the kitchen
2) Cut a piece from the inside of a mushroom and add it to the grain in the kitchen
3) wait until it grows 4) Fill a 50 gallon trash can with wood chips
5) Pour boiling water into the trashcan outside
6) Transfer woodchips and grain to 5 gallon bucket in a dirty greenhouse
As you can imagine, this wasn't a very sterile process, but it worked fine for hundreds of pounds of Oysters.
Which is fine, I guess, but I thought this was going to be something that would let me order one thing, and continually and easily grow-and-harvest mushrooms in perpetuity.