Smart beehive

Remote monitoring for a live hive, built so the instruments never bother the bees.

Fig. 1The hive with the instrumented base under it, out in the yard.

The bridge circuit for the load cells, wired up on protoboard. — Fig. 1The hive with the instrumented base under it, out in the yard.

Description

To check a hive you open it, which stresses the colony and wrecks the readings you wanted in the first place: temperature, humidity, weight and pressure.

I designed, programmed and prototyped a setup that reads all four over I2C and reports them remotely. Bees are sensitive to interference, so the radio side runs on low-energy wireless and the work is split across several Raspberry Pis to keep the power draw and the disturbance down.

A keeper can see how the hive is doing without lifting the lid.

Scope

When: Aug 2020 - Dec 2020
Where: The University of Texas at Dallas
Built with: I2C, Raspberry Pi, Low-energy wireless, Sensor integration, Embedded C/C++