I'm a newbie on here although I've tinkered a little in the past with PI's & Arduinos so go easy
I have an old PI and two Arduino Uno's and want to put these to use with a project.
Me and my partner keep bees and I'd really like to monitor the hive over time.
So what I'd like is as follows:
Temp and humidity inside the hive - Possibly multiple points in the hive
Temp and humidity outside the hive
Streaming camera for inside the hive. Something I can view quickly but also take timelapse sequences
Microphone to record the sound inside the hive. Not sure how to analyse this yet but will be interesting to listen and compare against the other data at a given time
Date and time stamp the data for ref
I can run a power cable to the hive easily enough but thinking some way for WiFi connection for sensor data etc. Certainly the camera and mic
I know you can buy these types of setups already but I'd really like to try and build my own. Mechanical stuff I'm with and can 3D print housings etc myself. But electronics...
So what do people think?
I have one Uno setup at the moment running off USB from my PC with a DHT11 attached and monitoring temp & humidity in my office.
I have an RTC Module (not setup yet)
Help, advice and pointing in the right direction would be gratefully accepted
Edit - I just saw you will run power. You can ignore my feedback But I’ll leave it here for reference.
I assume you’ll want to use batteries. In that case, your choices may be a little more limited.
Raspberry Pi is probably not a good choice for monitoring. UNO is ok, but I would suggest something with a little more “built-in” capability such as an ESP32. ESP32 is still fairly power hungry too, but much less than the Pi.
How’s your programming experience?
The camera is another animal. You could run that off of battery as long as you space out your pictures (once an hour or so). ESP32 can run your camera too. I only suggest the ESP32 because it already had BLE and WiFi and it’s cheap. Not to mention they have code for a camera too.
Nonetheless as someone else suggested you should look around to see what others have done too.
One more note... battery operated can be complicated. For instance, a LiPo battery is typically used; however, I would personally avoid it due to the whole fire thing. I’ve developed my own garden platform and I wanted to do bees next. It took me about a year to get right in spare time (using LoRa to report data to a backend and also control valves via battery). Anyways, just trying to save a little headache of changing hardware later.
Hi! Sometimes ago I started my own project GSM scales for the hive. Probably it will be interested for you.
There are two main goals
1 make the scale with minimal power consumption, so as not to change or charge the battery for a long time.
2. make the possibility of data transmission via GSM from third-party scales in order to measure the weight under several hives.
At present I reached the consumption at 12 microamperes in average. When powered by two series-connected Li-Pol batteries on 1600 mA, the voltage drops by 8 millivolts in 7 days. Taking into account the maximum voltage of each battery in 4.2 V, it turns out (8.4 V – 6.4 V)/0.008 V*7 days/365 days = 4.7 years, i.e. for the season it exactly should be enough. Now the scales are programmed for a reduced consumption mode. It wakes up to send SMS twice a day.
Power can be supplied from one Li-Pol battery (power to the GSM module is supplied through a relay), or from two series-connected Li-Pol batteries (power to the GSM module is supplied through a low dropout regulator, in this case the average consumption will be lower).
NRF24 modules footprint is located on the PCB to get data transfer from several scales.
GSM weight module is controlled by two touch buttons: touch one switches scales into the mode of recording the phone number by SMS. Touching the second button will send an SMS with the value of the current weight. SMS are sent every 12 hours from the last touch of the weight button.
Now I am looking for the new ways where this project could be pushed: audio, video etc… It turns out to be quite difficult to debug the hardware and software to achieve the required parameters for consumption and operating modes.
