Beehive sensor, what hardware?

I made my own hardware (without solar panel) making our beehives smarter. It’s still a prototype and it’s LoRaWAN ready! Still needs some hardware upgrades & software changes to connect it over LoRaWAN (no TTN coverage at home :worried:) but the first prototype has been running on a set of AAA batteries in a private sensor network for over 2 months now without issues. I’m only logging temperature (outside, 2x inside) & humidity (inside & outside) at the moment.

More tech info about the “BeeMonitor” here: https://eth0maz.wordpress.com/2017/05/18/the-beemonitor-project/

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I already have three hives full of bees, its the monitoring that’s interesting to me

Indeed it’s great to get support from the community. I’m no coder, I’ve run linux for a few years on my laptop, run a couple of servers and i’ve written a few clunky bash scripts. If it’s ready for people at that skill level then great.

I’ve used Graphna a bit when playing with an aquaponics monitor

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I’m not in any group developing bee stuff.

I’m aware of:

  • OS beehives - great project, but written for higher bandwidth, their audio analysis/ swarm warning stuff would be really interesting to get running locally, and just sending the alerts over the network.

  • Hiveeyes Great looking FOSS project, interested in LoRaWAN but again written with bigger bandwidth available

  • Arnia (And other similar commerical offerings) Functional, works out of the box, but Wifi and £expensive

  • Hostabee Cheaper commericial offering, (80 euro) but not FOSS which is important to me

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[quote=“tomtor, post:10, topic:7491”]:

Dht22 sensors are a non expensive option, which also include a temperature sensor, but they are for indoor use. It could work in your usecase if they are mounted in a protected area.
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Thanks!
Does this si7021 offer any advantage over Dht22? I’d rather spend a bit more and get something robust. Combining the temp/humidity appeals as theres less wires getting in the way.

ok sorry Sam, your name popped up (Rossiter).

anyway… what about this beehive dashboard

http://www.markderbyshire.co.uk/emoncms/Mark

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@sam-1
https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/assets/assets/000/035/931/original/Support_Documents_TechnicalDocs_Si7021-A20.pdf states “indoor weather stations”. So no obvious advantage over dht22.

Reading the dht22 spec sheet they don’t explicitly mention indoor usage, only that dew might effect the reading. Dht22 looks like the best bet, it is also a bit more expensive than the si7021 if that improves your confidence :slight_smile:

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@eTh0maz Looks good!

In your blog you don’t mention the microcontroller used? Do you plan on publishing the hard- software designs on github.com?

The temp sensors look like ds18b20 (> 3V operation), but you state operation till 1.8V.

@sam-1 how about joining efforts with @eTh0maz ?

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made my own hardware (without solar panel) making our beehives smarter. It’s still a prototype and it’s LoRaWAN ready!

Looks great! Did you get the boards made up? Have you got any left?

Yes very interested in where @eTh0maz has got to, and on collaborating…

As an aside I spotted the Openbeehive project Seem to be using a BME280 which adds atmospheric pressure into the mix.

Nice. Looks good. Eventually I’d like to be getting mobile notifications, but a web dashboard would be a really good first step.

I guess it’s worth saying where I’d like to end up eventually.

  1. Completely FOSS stack (possibly with Optional closed source/ SASS graphing)
  2. LoRa via TTN
  3. £free online graphing and recording for end-users, eg Thingspeak or Opensensors?
  4. Open data accessible to researchers
  5. Mobile phone notifications on swarm/ low temp alert
  6. Local Audio analysis and swarm alerts

I don’t mind using proprietry services, but I want an automated copy of my data at a minumum.

The various projects seem to have different parts of this

Os beehives seem to have gone furthest with audio analysis and mobile app
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=67&v=73RXNL-iYA4 (but I think they use closed source Particle as their backend, and particle doesn’t interface with LoRa?)

Hiveeyes seem to have a complete FOSS backend
https://hiveeyes.org/ but again not set up for LoRa.

Maybe it’s a case of pushing data to both thingspeak and Opensensors?

Opensensors to give the Open data/ Open stack angle, and Thingspeak as backup/redundancy and mobile alerting

Just thinking out loud here, realise not entirely coherent.

Dear Sam,

thanks for mentioning the Hiveeyes project. I’m one of its members and the main author of the backend data acquisition and -visualization system Kotori. Feel free to ask me anything.

We are happy to provide further information as our system might be interesting to the TTN community for many different data acquisition tasks in the field of environmental monitoring and beyond. As it integrates InfluxDB, Grafana and more FOSS components in an elegant way, we also posted its description to the topic LABS - Store and visualize data using InfluxDB and Grafana.

I will try to respond to your list of specific requirements in the next post as good as i can.

With kind regards,
Andreas.

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added to the Big List … tnx

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Dear Sam,

thanks for outlining your imagination of a perfect system. It is very similar to our goals, let me get more specific along the lines:

As this is also very important to us, it was one of our main goals from the very beginning, see also Goals — Hiveeyes system documentation 0.9.0 documentation. We don’t make compromises on that: All system components are and will be based on open source licenses.

While looking at TTN since about a year, we just recently made some little efforts to push things forward, see also "Richtiges" LoRaWAN Gateway - Funkinfrastruktur / Wireless infrastructure - Hiveeyes. However, we are already transmitting measurement data from remote sites using plain LoRa (using a HopeRF RFM96 transceiver module without LoRaWAN).

While you can always host the FOSS system components on your own machine, we also operate a shared platform free of charge for the beekeepers community, see also The Hiveeyes system documentation — Hiveeyes system documentation 0.9.0 documentation and Grafana. While not everything is as polished as a commercial IoT platform yet, you will gain way more flexibility, features and peace of mind through best-of-breed FOSS components. When there’s reasonable demand, we will think about implementing adapters to Thingspeak or Opensensors.io to further grow the ecosystem and improve the versatility of the system.

Exactly ;]! We are already in exchange with researchers from the neurobiology department of FU Berlin and the cognitive neuroinformatics group of University Bremen about that topic and appreciate more researchers to join our efforts.

Definitively ;]! Threshold alerting is already possible through the great mqttwarn as well as Grafana Alert Notifications.

We are already digging here (see First Steps (digital) Sound Recording - Audio - Hiveeyes), but OSBH or others might have made further progress on this topic already, see https://community.akerkits.com/t/main-thread-current-work-status/326.

We recently introduced the system on the OSBH forum, it might make a good followup reading:

https://community.akerkits.com/t/the-hiveeyes-system/440

As said, we are happy to receive further suggestions and answer any questions which might come to mind. Also feel welcome to join us at the Hiveeyes community forum! To get more precise: The system was not designed for “us”, but offers a generic infrastructure for the whole community of beekeepers monitoring their beehives.

With kind regards,
the people of Hiveeyes.

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Thanks! At the moment the prototype is running on an atmega328p as used in the arduino’s.
Plans are to upgrade to another microcontroller, I have experience with the atmega1284p from other projects or I might chose a newer cortex M0 variant.
I don’t have plans to make it commercial or open source until everything is as it should.
I’m using Si70XX sensors for temperature & humidity. Low power, voltage down to 1.9V (correction: not 1.8V that I thought…) and small enough :slight_smile:
There are no DS18B20 used, these need indeed >3V to be able to work.

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@amotl Hiveeyes is a great platform as I can see! Much documentation etc.
My hardware setup is similar, I’m using an RFM69 wireless link to connect the BeeMonitor to an custom arduino based receiver that feeds data trough UART to my raspberry pi (not over USB). I was already running Domoticz so I also used it for the BeeMonitor. It works but it isn’t ideal beedata, I really need a new software platform.
So it might be a good idea to modify & upgrade my hardware so it can be used for Hiveeyes. My goals are to keep it small, universal & low power to keep it running for years. Without battery charging, solar panels, …

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Dear @eTh0maz,

Thanks for acknowledging. Yes, we put quite some effort in it to make it easy for others to adapt it to their own requirements and also to encourage beekeepers to join us and share the measurements with each other in the spirit of open data. When it comes to discussing specific observations in a collaborative way, it’s really fun!

Cool! The USB connection in our case is also just an UART on the Linux system side, so the setup is almost identical. How do you currently read and process the data on the Linux system? We are currently using a little Python daemon (see BERadio ff.), which decodes the radio message payloads and publishes measurement data in JSON format to the MQTT bus. We are happy to integrate specifics of your radio message format if you share some more details.

I bet the modifications required will be very small. We will be happy to serve your needs and requirements and even more if we could get you on board. :slight_smile: May i ask you to join our community forum to sort things out? We can link the conversation to this discussion to enable other people to follow it.

Last but not least (to make things a bit clearer maybe): All system components are available as Debian packages for the armhf architecture, so operating the whole system on a Raspberry Pi is possible. Some of our members are already doing this. Optionally, the data can be shared with the collaborative platform by connecting the MQTT brokers to each other.

Just get back to us if you have further questions!

With kind regards,
Andreas.

P.S.: One of our members who joined in January came to us with pretty much the same intentions. He is also using a Raspberry Pi, however not as a gateway, but with sensors directly attached. Enjoy reading:

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You need a Sodaq LoRaBee … hhahahaahaa

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Dear @eTh0maz,

for getting started with the collaborative platform, you might want to have a look at the documentation about data acquisition, either using MQTT or HTTP. When publishing data to the “testdrive” channel, the measurements should appear at the “testdrive” Grafana dashboard. If that works for you, please get back to us for assigning an unique “network” identifier, i.e. your personal realm.

For running the whole stack on your own iron, the documentation about the backend setup might be a good reading.

Don’t hesitate to ask if you have further questions.

Cheers,
Andreas.

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This is a fascinating thread. Another sensor you might consider is one or more accelerometers built into the frames. Some research has already been done on this, though quite a bit of data analysis is required. However, it potentially contains information about the state of the hive we can’t currently obtain.

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@amotl, I need some time to get started with it. There won’t be much hardware changes required for the switch to Hiveeyes as I’ve seen in the docs. All can be done is programming/software. For myself I want to add more options and add the option to connect a scale (load cell based) in one device.
I’m only interested in collecting beedata as follows:

  • Inside temperature from the hive core
  • Maybe temperature/humidity sensor in the cover, still inside the hive
  • Outside temperature/humidity measured (sensor in the BeeMonitor, optional with external sensor)
  • Beehive weight

Some other already included features are:

  • Dipswitch to preset beehive ID (allows up to 16 devices in one network without software changes)
  • Dipswitch for “wakeup” interval (can be preset on 15 min, 30 min, 1h or 2h)
  • Wakeup button (manual wake)
  • RGB led (visual feedback)
  • Buzzer (sound feedback)
  • RJ12 connectors for sensors

For me that’s enough. But suggestions, features I’ve missed, … are welcome!

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Sounds good. What hive scale are you using? Is it a diy design? Or a commercial offering?

It also increasingly seems like the functionality you describe above seems to be that best suited to the bandwidth constraints of LoRaWAN. Could become part of a ‘semi-standardised’ opensource ‘hiveeyes’ box, using the hiveeyes backend.

Having said that, the audio analysis & accelerometer stuff also very interesting. I wonder if that should be tackled as a separate / side project ‘buzz box’ or similar. It seems that box would need more processing power, and therefore bigger solar /power requirements. There is no reason that the ‘buzzbox’ couldn’t pass swarm alerts to the ‘hiveeyes box’ for transmission over the network.

Perhaps data from the ‘buzzbox’ could be saved as sonograms to Sd card to be uploaded every couple of months?