Hello everyone!
I am a 50 year old beekeeper (having bees for 10 years now in Ontario, Canada) and also hobby robot builder. I had an accident and wrecked my back and can’t lift the hive bozes anymore. That prompted me to find an easier way to do beekeeping so even if I will ever be in a wheelchair I could still do it.
I arrived here from Open Source Beehives. I was considering building my own BuzzBoard to fit my project, but I ended up frustrated with their limitations.
But first, let me explain what I want to do, then perhaps you can point me in the right direction:
I am building a small apiary on wheels, 8 hives and a few nucs in an enclosed trailer. The hives are a modification of the AZ Slovenian hive, to be modular and to use standard Langstroth foundation in the frames. The hives will have 3 stacked boxes and the top box will house Flow frames.
Since everything is in close proximity, I want to use a Raspberry Pi to read the sensors either directly, or using I2C slave Arduino nodes. The Pi should send the collected data to the Hiveeyes Community server to help scientists gather more data, but also keep a local copy. Since I will be moving the trailer arround, I will need celular communication to the internet. Also I need to be notified on my cell if there is an emergency happening.
I really want to use sound analysis along with the temperature, humidity and weight to determine the status of the hives. Ideally, one should be able to let the bees work and only intervene when necessary, but accurate diagnostic of the hive is needed.
I have lots of experience with the Arduino, but almost none with Raspberry Pi in terms of programming. I have a hard time understanding that backend part, so please point me to some tutorials to get a better understanding.
OSBeehives use a MEMS microphone connected to a Particle Photon to read the sound of the hive. Can something similar be done on the Raspberry Pi? Right now their result on the hive analisis is just binary, either Alive or Collapsed. Not really useful at all. That can be done simply with an Arduino and a regular microphone. I have heard about other companies that use an AI that needs to be trained to diagnose the hive. Is something like this already available here?
I have lots of other questions and I already thought about how to build my system, but I would prefer not to reinvent the wheel. I am good at adapting ideas, especially hardware, although I am not really an electronist engineer. But I hope that with your guidance I will achieve my goals and make them yet another fork for the open source beekeeping community.
Thank you so much for all your efforts and support!
Gabriel Petrut