Scope
Building an low power autonomous system for remote monitoring of the current bee conditions, concretely weight changes, temperature in the beehive and weather conditions - outside temperature, relative humidity of outside air, illumination intensity at the beehive entrance and barometric air pressure.
Technical solution
Microcontroller
Core of the system is Arduino MKR Fox 1200. This is a microcontroller supporting the low power Sigfox wireless transmission system. On a battery, this is able to send data for a couple of months without recharging.
Scale
For measurement of weight changes I chose Bosche H40A load cell (200 kg) and fixed it to two aluminium plates. Arduino Uno based OpenScale microcontroller from Sparkfun has been used to convert the signal from the scale and communicate with Arduino over serial interface.
Weather station
Several sensors are used in the project:
- On-board temperature sensor from OpenScale to measure temperature in the computer case.
- Temperature and humidity sensor DHT22 to measure temperature and humidity inside the bee hive.
- BMP280 barometric pressure sensor used also for measurement of outside temperature.
Schema
Code
See my Github project page for the Arduino source code.