Lets make a Beehive Service- Automates a beehive with environmental and bee health sensors, and displays the data remotely via geolocated community driven data on a world map.

For the past couple years, I've been a happy and excited member of this group, and since I've known about it, MRL has filled a place in my mind as a beautiful backbone for just about anything. Some core projects for MRL such as the InMoov AI allow MRL to really reach for the stars in terms of complexity, but another core strength to MRL is the fact that is can flex and take in new processes and automation, so as Grog says, always like to try and push all the new buttons. :)

With Plantoids Service, the key vision is remote data sensign applied to an autonomous plant minded robot. In essense, the plant had a subordinate system of sensors and actuators that are designed to serve the plant's needs and quality of live, as well as gather and display data for human operatives to use in order to monitor and ensure the success of the experiment and system survival. 

Abtracting a service like the Plantoid service for other environmental needs proves to need little modification in order to create a suite of datalogging capabilities. Other ventures such as the Open Source Beehives project prove to be capable and growing in providing a large set of resources that its members might use to further the efforts of the total project. I believe that MRL may add some value in the AI side of some more advanced systems for bee watching that might make some interesting things happen for the data, though the current set of sensor that is being developed is wide and very good, remote cameras and actuator control could go a long way to help gain a more immersive perspective on bee health. 

 

I believe that using the simplistic NIR cameras on the plantoid service alone, one could gain powerful visual images for the patterns and behaviour of bees, as well as using the filtered NIR to detect pollen and pollutant retrieval to the hive. 

Starting hardware and BOM:

ODROID U2 w/ wifi dongle

NIR and RGB Cameras for streaming, OpenCV filtering, and stills.

Arduino:   datalogging automatically. Maybe Borsaci's NodeMCU activities have some ground here. 

   Temp, Light, AQ, VOC and any other helpful sensor that might be wanted for internal and external datapoints in, on, and around the hive.

 

Resources:

Bee counting:  -Needed for tracking hive population and activity. 

http://hivetool.org/hardware/counters/vaib9_mummert.pdf

http://www.instructables.com/id/Honey-Bee-Counter/

 

C'mon, lets jive the hives!

GroG

9 years ago

Sign Me In ! 

Ready for Bee Duty Sir !

Software no problem - but what is the plan "exactly" ?  What about In/Out counting ? (shows rough activity)  Thermometer? Humidity?  .. oooh wait these are all Plantoid sensors Ya ?

I've been working so long with Serial, VirtualDevices Services and testing .. It would be nice to implement a "real" thing...  

When do we start?
What do we need?
Where do we go?
I'm ready ... just need directions !

Let start now! The bees need us to support the hive! 

Resources:

Backbone System:

-Portable Droid, PI, or other peer to run customized Bee services on startup.

- 1 RGB Video camera

- 1 NIR camera feed-

each selectable as source for total one stream, and one for stillshot/optical analysis feed.

 

Datalogging System - configurable settings for sampling

-Arduino

  -AQ

  -VOC

  -IR

  -LDR

  -DHT11

 

Beehive + Bees:

Beehive = a "smart home" for bees: The various designs for the open source beehives that are out there are all really cool. I build essentially build the one that works best for my region and build in small compartment for the computing and hardware to home. I'm sure making proper conduit for the wiring and various hardware will need to be built in, and so not knowing what that struggle is yet, I'm just gonna say its all for the bees...

Bees = Big Investment : I've wanted to get bees every year they show up on display and knowing its a little bit late to get started this year, I can resolve to wait to install my live hive until 2016 and save the ~$400 there until I'm ready and everything will be safe and sustainable. This is a great reason to contact local beekeepers and learn from them, and work to be able to test the hardware in a sample environment. 

 

Automated Features:

If I were dreaming for features, I would want to be able to access a world map of pins such as the Smart Citizen network that already exists, and be able to click through to a live-ish webpage that was serving automated updates of feeds from my hive, maybe even to the point of receiving push notifications from the hive via XMPP letting me know new data samples are up..

Much like the dials and feeds of the Plantoid services we were creating, but simply a broadcast mechanism of the function of my BeeHiveMind* (tm pending, BEPSL2015)

 

Any thoughts... buzzing around your head?

Sure I got thoughts ! 

Let's look at the design constraints ...

Ok, no beehive for you - but why not put it all the bee monitoring stuff in a nice little package + solar?     Don't know the logistics of Battery + Solar Cells + energy consumption of the Odroid, Pi or other Puter ..  Make it so you can be off grid ?  Would be a nice design not to require plug.  Once we have it down, mebbe some nice beekeeper will allow it to set next to his hive.

Communication ...  Wifi ! - would be best .. it more important to have good communication skills than be "smart" - if the dumb little puter can push the data into the Bee Cloud then it will be successfull !

Sensor Array - get crazy !  More data the better ! (non plug energy supply for sensors would be the biggest constraint)

Maps !  Hell yes maps !  But MORE !  We want analytics !  In and out counts, activity ! 1st 2nd & 3rd derivatives !  Temprature, Humidity, Pressure mixed with online information like weather report, pollen count, pollution index, from the localized area !  Our BEPSL managers will want pretty graphs to demonstrate their bee management savvy !

Plug something in already ! :D

OK, so it took me a while to get back to this but I managed to root out some good stuff for this build. 

I'm going to make a small housing for the computing and sensor, that can act alone as a simple sensory tower or in application with a guided mission, like streaming live data from a beehive.

BOM:

ODROID U3 w/ wifi dongle

NIR and RGB Cameras for streaming, OpenCV filtering, and stills.

Arduino:   datalogging automatically. 

   Temp, Light, AQ, VOC and any other helpful sensor that might be wanted for internal and external datapoints in, on, and around the hive. 

 

I'll be getting everything wired up and ready to boot as soon as I can.