Welcome!

Willkommen! Welcome! ¡Bienvenidos! Bienvenue! Benvenuti! Huānyíng!

In the spirit of open source and open hardware, the project is developing a flexible beehive monitoring infrastructure toolkit and platform based on affordable hardware, wireless telemetry and modern software. You are welcome to join us!


About

Hiveeyes is an open source, DIY toolkit for building beehive monitoring setups. It aims at making non-invasive beekeeping as affordable and comfortable as possible. All system components are available under free licenses to encourage the growth of an open ecosystem.

Sensor hardware

The sensor hardware uses low-cost, low-power electronics components: AVR ATMega328p/ATMega1284p, HX711, DS18B20, DHT33, RFM69/95 radio modules. Running autonomously in the field for a reasonable amount of time puts some demand on the power supply. Supporting different ways of data transmission is another challenge. The firmware is mostly based on Arduino Core.

Data telemetry

Measurement data originating at the digital sensors is transmitted using different technologies, transport protocols and serialization formats like RF69 and RF95 (UHF transceivers that operate in the 433, 868 and 915 MHz license-free ISM band), GSM/GPRS (the global digital cellular network standard used by mobile phones), WiFi, MQTT, HTTP, Bencode and CSV. These different ways of transmission fit well to their respective usage scenarios and environments (desert vs. countryside vs. urban).

Backend

A flexible data historian collects measurement information from the sensor nodes. It is built upon contemporary and open technologies and software components like MQTT, InfluxDB and Grafana and does not depend on any 3rd-party commercial software services.

It operates our shared data collection platform “swarm.hiveeyes.org” and also works self-contained even on a RaspberryPi or similar System-on-a-Chip computers.


Project infrastructure


How is it going?

The roots of this project reach back into 2011, where one of its founders started researching into the topic of low-cost beehive monitoring during the advent of the Arduino ecosystem. This was offering an affordable, low-barrier entrypoint to MCU programming together with a growing, vibrant community.

Early hardware and firmware prototypes were conceived in the upcoming years and the number of project members started growing significantly during 2014. After a while of planning, discussions and iterations based on the work of the founding members, the designing and building phase restarted collaboratively in 2015/2016. As of summer 2016, all major components, requirements and specifications of the system have been nailed down. All software required to run the whole stack is available on GitHub.

Starting late summer 2016, more and more people doing similar things started to get in touch with us and vice versa. We are finally happy to support the broader community with infrastructure to share their outcomes with each other and look forward to the next development iterations. Feel welcome to join our efforts!