Hi, I'm Jon, and today I'm building a rough
draft
of an electronics box for a beehive.
This will hold the core electronics;
a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino,
that all of the other electronic sensors
in the beehive will plug into.
First, I simply put together the parts for
a shallow
hivebox that I purchased online.
If you've got a tablesaw, and the right blades,
you can certainly make all of this yourself
from raw lumber.
But based on the limited quantity I needed,
and how cheap it is to buy the boards pre-cut
it made sense for me to just take the short-cut.
If you want to try to make all of the cuts
yourself,
there are tons of youtube videos available
showing lots of different approaches.
Next I painted the box to protect it.
You can see paint drying on even more boxes
for
the beehive in the background.
If you've already got beehives, and therefore
lots of beeswax, then you may want to consider
using that instead of paint. But these are
my
first hives, so paint it is.
Bees will coat the inside of the hive with
a substance
called propolis, which is a resin like substance
made
from tree buds, sap, and other sticky stuff
they collect.
I don't want them covering the electronics
in this
box with that stuff, so I'm going to try to
keep them
out of the box entirely by inserting a 1/8"
wire mesh
screen in the bottom, to separate the bees
from
the electronics.
Since this is just a rough draft for now,
I'm installing
some of the electronics on a breadboard.
I'll probably eventually do something more
permanent,
but for now I need to stay flexible.
I want a temperature and humidity sensor in
the box
with the electronics, which will be at the
top of the
hive, to track the environment at the top.
Later, I'll be adding another temperature
and humidity
sensor, among others, to the brood box at
the bottom
of the hive.
I expect the comparison between the top and
bottom of the hive might be interesting.
My original plan was to have everything Arduino
based,
but several experiments at different approaches
to
transmit sensor readings from the hive back
to the
house, failed or the insufficient or unreliable
for the
distance required.
So, I eventually reverted to using a Raspberry
Pi to
connect directly to our home wifi and transmit
the
data that way.
Much of the initial work with the sensors was
with the
Arduino though, so, I'm still using an Arduino
for
some stuff.
Eventually, I may migrate everything over
to the
Raspberry Pi, or, I may not.
Finally, I put my mashup of the Raspberry
Pi, the
Arduino, and the breadboard with the temperature
and humidity sensor into the electronics box,
took
it out to our, as yet unoccupied, beehive
(the bees
will be arriving later), and plugged the Raspberry
Pi
into my solar power setup (more on that in
a future
video).
Later on, I decided to put a small piece of
cardboard
underneath the Arduino, to protect the exposed
solder connections on the underside from shorting
out against the wire mesh.
The way this currently works is the Arduino
sends
the sensor readings to the Raspberry Pi over
a USB
Serial connection.
Ruby code running on the Pi then transmits
the data
over our home wifi via HTTP to a Ruby Rack
App
running on another Raspberry Pi running in
the house.
This Raspberry Pi stores the data in a database
and
writes out csv files. Then a web application
served
from the same Pi uses the D3 Javascript library
to
read the csv files, and generate charts showing
the
changes in the sensor values over time.
It's also copying the csv files up to Amazon
S3, to be
served to my website, where another D3 script
makes more charts.
I'll provide a link to the website below.
My upcoming plans, and a reason you'll want
to
subscribe to this channel, include...
A more permanent power connection...
Temperature and humidity sensors in the brood
box
as well as sensors for ambient temperature
and
humidity outside the hive.
A scale weighing the entire hive to try to
estimate
how much honey has been collected.
An automatically refilling water supply for
the bees
so that they hopefully stay away from neighborhood
swimming pools.
UV, visible, and infrared light sensors outside
the hive.
Possibly a rain sensor outside the hive...
An infrared camera and microphone, intermittently
sampling the sights and sounds from inside
the hive.
Possibly some sort of automatic ventilation
when the
hive gets too hot or humid, but only if I
can do so in
such a way that I'm confident will never put
the colony
at risk of chilling or other hazards.
And if everything goes really well, detectors
at the
hive entrance to count the bees as they enter
and
leave the hive.
I plan to do all of these sensors within the
context
of the beehive, but any one of them could
easily
be used for other projects.
So even if you have no interest in keeping
bees,
I hope you'll find something useful for whatever
project you've got in mind.
Thanks for watching, and be sure to check
out the
channel for other related videos, and please
subscribe.
