The intention of this project is to measure the parameters of a beehive (weight, temperature and humidity), record and upload them on cloud and acces the values from anywhere (home).
The first step was measuring the weight using weight 4 sensors (max 20 Kg/sensor) with sufficient accuracy. The reuslts were surprisingly good I would say.
.... yet more to come...
2017.07.17
Update 1
It had to pass almoust a year to find a way to transmit the measured data to cloud. I think LoRaWan is a good approach. Just can't wait to find out more about it.
2018.08.15
A selfmade Gateway for TheThingsNetwork:
- RPi3(UK - www.raspberrypi.org/)
- Backplane Board (Switzerland - shop.coredump.ch/product/ic880a-lorawan-gateway-backplane/)
- concentrator board iC880A (Germany - shop.imst.de/wireless-modules/lora-products/8/ic880a-spi-lorawan-concentrator-868-mhz)
- the sender TTN one (Netherlands -www.antratek.de/the-things-uno )
...Antenna still missing...
2018.08.28
The Backplane was bought not solldered (cheaper) and, as you can see in the pic below, I "gave it some love" ( having some hard time with the 40 pins solldered under the magnifying glass).
Now also with POE (Power over Ethernet). There is a connection compatibility problem whenn adding the newly appeared POE Hut: The POE does not provide any pins on the backside (where the Backplate should stay). In this case was solved with extra 2x20 Pins added separatelly between the plates and hopping for a good contact due to the screws.
Pigtail has arrived. Waiting for the adaptor F Male - SMA Female ...
2018.09.05
It seems the backplane is mallfunctioning. Here the barebone application, only RPi and iC880A connected with cable.
One of the input pins of the backplane was not realy good soldered. I started testing manually, pin with pin the pins needed for iC (13-17). I send input signal from Pi (GPIO.output(pinNr,1) and measured at the connection pins of the iC (without having the iC mounted).
Here testing the IP68 box...
Shining in the sun...
Now to take care of measuring part.
Update 2019.06.17
The good news is that I succeded to integrate the weight sensors in the foundation of the beehive. The bad one is that, due to the low position of my antenna, the 2.5 Km between mein LoRaWan GW ang the location of my beehives is not covered. Hope to get acces to some better, higher location to install the GW. Untill then, I will be working on the offline version of the sensor: that presumes logging the weight on a SD Card. Therefore I will need a clock (as Arduino has no static - reboot safe - one), a SD Card Shield and intend to show the actual weight on a LCD Display 16x2 Chars.
The LoRaWan Shiled for Arduino:
Update 2019.09.05
I used 2 ADS 1115 convertors for differential readings.
2020.04.15
Here measuring the beehive Parameter (temp and humidity) with a LoRa Tile STM32 Sensor. The piece is a very low power consuming, including a lot of features like accelerometer and a light RGB sensor I am using to detect any "strange" interference with my a few km away beehive.
A raised RGB value and a "move" = 1 means somebody lifted the cover of the beehive (the light sensor and the accelerometer).
