12th August 2021
OVERVIEW
Fitbit-For-Bees is a project that is aimed to monitor the health of the beehives to help the hobby beekeepers as well as professionals who have huge apiaries. Using a number of tiny sensors which could be fitted to the hive it would be possible to monitor and report any changes and parameters, allowing a beekeeper to respond quickly if any conditions threatened the hive, e.g. high winds altering the hive’s orientation and affecting its stability or sudden increase in temperature or humidity. All such excursions adversely affect the bees’ health, so need immediate attention.
All the data would be collected and pushed securely on to a dashboard that would be available to view over the internet, via a PC or on a mobile phone.
GOALS
- Collect temperature, humidity, pressure data from the hive.
- Monitor hive stability and orientation changes
- Live feed with sound of inside the hive.
CHALLENGES
- Most of the Beehive deployments are not near a power source. Therefore, deploying a system that streams audio-video would be extremely difficult
- Recurring monthly charges for cellular coverage to send data to a cloud platform if the Beehive hive is not within a Wi-Fi coverage.
- Need large bandwidth if you want to stream audio-video over internet.
- Support for Over-The-Air software updates to the system.
SPECIFICATIONS
As described in the challenges section, it would be very difficult to tackle all the challenges. E.g., during my research, I discovered that the closest power source from a beehive deployment was around 0.6 KM. Another instance was, the cellular coverage was very poor that would make the streaming audio-video data impossible.
So, to make the best of all worlds, I have built two versions of the Beehive Health monitoring solution.
Version 1
In this version, the device consists of an Internet of Things gateway with an array of sensors, everything put into a weatherproof box. The box exposes sensor probes that go into the hive, start sending data to the gateway and the gateway pushes it into a database which is visualized onto a dashboard. The sensors are attached using removable clamps, which make…
