Hello,
I’m Dave from Manchester in the UK. I’m a coder (python and javascript mostly) but reasonably new to hardware. I have three hives at about 30m out of home WiFi range. I’ve played with the Raspberry Pi, but am a novice with Arduino. Could someone suggest a good starting point to set up a monitoring project please?
Regards,
Dave.
Hi Dave, welcom! Perhaps you may have a look at our Bee Observer project and the hardware and software we are using there: Anleitung Aufbau und installation des Sensor-Kits It’s in German but you may use a translation service.
The fitting code is in MicroPython so it may more convenient for you than Arduino C++ code, see: GitHub - hiveeyes/hiveeyes-micropython-firmware: Hiveeyes MicroPython Datalogger - data logging for humans.
Hello and welcome Dave.
The Hardware of the Bee Observer Project. Is that, what you need, i think too. Thanks @clemens.
The antennas of the Pycom are better als there from the Raspberry. And if that not enough, you can optional use an external antenna. My englisch are Not the best, but the most of the members have no problem, if you write in english in a german speaking theads, me too.
Best regards Michael
Hi Dave,
good to have you here, please feel welcome to our small community.
As I am kind of the backend guy here, I would also like to point out Meßdaten an die Hiveeyes Plattform übermitteln to you, which is the canonical entrypoint about how to submit measurement data to the platform. [Did you figure out how to use the translation feature already?]
However, please recognize that everything is open source and can be operated on your own behalf or on behalf on local communities you might be member of. However, we are especially happy if we can spark the interest in people to become members of the collaborative data sharing which we are trying to establish between beekeepers and scientists in the role of a catalyst.
On the technical side, our system and its components - while sometimes not looking polished that much - are reasonably flexible and mature enough to be used in different environmental scenarios having different connectivity requirements.
Thanks for letting us know about the backyard scenario you are looking at. When thinking of a WiFi-based solution using one of the cheap MCUs with integrated WiFi-transciever, Espressif (ESP8266, ESP32) immediately comes to mind as they are constantly gaining more popularity.
So, to keep the introduction reasonably short from my side: Have a good time digging through our forum, we will be happy to help and answer questions you might ask yourself which are not yet made crystal clear by means of our ramifications ;]. We will be happy to fill in the gaps along the lines of your questions.
With kind regards,
Andreas.