Following on from my previous posts about a tool or piece of technology that can be used to monitor bee hives and the status of bee’s; I’m pleased to announce the next step of my development of this project.
Originally code named ‘BeePi’ because I was building on the Raspberry Pi computer system, I have developed it further and it has evolved into ‘BeeSafe’ – a micro monitoring tool used to monitor the status of a bee hive.
BeeSafe Features:
| Accelerometer | External Environment Sensor |
| Abient Temperature Sensor | Magnetic Switch Alarm |
| Brood Temperature Sensor | LED Status Lights |
Which will allow me to work out:
| Current temperature of Bee cluster in the Hive – Are the Bees still alive |
| Current temperature of the environment around the hive – Are the bee’s likely to be active |
| If the Hive is open – Is someone doing something to the Hive |
| If the hive has fallen over – Has an animal or something caused the hive to fall over exposing the inside of the hive |
| If the hive is being moved – Useful if you think your Hive is being stolen |
| Quick Traffic light: Red, Amber or Green Status of the Hive |
This is the first picture of the base PCB that will operate BeeSafe:
Bee Safe Base PCB
As you can see, it still requires a lot of work including soldering all the components to the board and then programming the system to detect and report from the various sensors.
From a software perspective at the Hive level, I need to start writing how and what the software will do, how often it will record measurements, what the traffic light system will show to the users, what data will be submitted to the cloud for capture and in what frequency.
Next stop is the cloud.. While I have ideas on what data I want to capture. I need to nail down specifications on what I want the cloud to do and how I want the cloud to be engaged by users.
Web, Email, Text and API are all things I want included in the project but the balance is finding out the best way to include them. If your Hive was broken into – would you want a text message saying that? What about on-demand reporting about how your hives are doing? What about logging in to your hive in the middle of winter to confirm that the bee cluster is overwintering well and that the temperature internally isn’t dropping too low (a sign the bees are starving and dying off).
I hope to manufacture these boards in greater numbers once I have developed this initial PCB, confirming that all the components work in the way they should and that I have suitable demand for the BeeSafe Project.