My connected bee hives have been running for quite some time now but I never took the time to finalize the documentation in the form of a “connected bee hive for dummies” document. On top of my code – which is probably not the best in the world – this GitHub repo includes a 65 pages document which relates the experience of an old guy which engineering degree is more than 40 years old and who tried to dig into the latest technologies (python, C++, LoRaWAN, Arduino, etc…) which were all totally new to him until very recently. Might be helpful for beginners ?
My implementation is classical (Arduino/LoRaWan/NodeRED/InfluxDB/Grafana) but I also have included a Google Sheet integration retrieving the hive data in a google sheet, which is convenient for calibration purposes. The data being transmitted are weight, external temperature, humidity and pressure plus internal brood temperature. The data are transmitted every 15mn by default but this is configurable by sending an ad hoc downlink to the hive (a python script is provided to send downlinks to the hives).
My code includes a weight temperature compensation algorithm using a nonlinear model which has proven to be effective and which is described precisely in the document.
My connected bee hives include a small sirup pump allowing to feed the hives remotely. This is both convenient when the apiary is not close by and very effective to develop the hives in the spring or before winter (feeding with a small quantity of sugar very often seems to be more effective than a bigger quantity less often). The application includes a smartphone app from which the user can trigger the pumps (the app is communicating with a set of python scripts communicating with the app and sending downlinks to the hives). From the same app, it’s possible to send a downlink which prevent the hive from sending data during a certain pre-determined time (when hives are open, we want to avoid to plot a wrong point on the hive weight curve).
My apiary being too far away from the closest LoRaWAN gateway I had to add one (with the 4G option), which is powered from a 12V battery charged with PV panels. The gateway being quite power angry, it is switched on by an “energy saving device” only when uploads are transmitted by the scales. My code includes therefore a mechanism which synchronizes the time of each scale and the one of the energy saver device with TTN time. The time synchronization logic is controlled by two python scripts which can be launched either manually or at regular time intervals such as once a week, to set the time of the nodes: the first script is listening to the next uplink sent by a node. The second one is triggered when this next uplink is received, at which time it sends a “set time” downlink to the node with the time of this last received uplink to which the duration between two measures is added.
