A low powered bee hive monitoring system powered by Nordic Semiconductor and Zephyr RTOS
Beehaviour Monitoring prototype is a low power solution for monitoring, modeling, predicting and visualizing hive health through Bluetooth LE and LTE communication between a hive located anywhere and the beekeeper!
It consists of a system of three sensor modules, a unit for data processing and a unit for cloud communication. The internal sensors are all part of the Thingy:52, and the external sensors are the BroodMinder-W weight scale and the Bee Counter.
The Bee Counter is based on Easy Bee Counter, an open source project. It was expanded to include Nordic’s peripheral UART example to send the data to the nRF5340-unit. The concept of a Bee Counter might seem simple at first glance, but the data gathered could be used in a plethora of ways! Rate of expansion or decline of bee flights might indicate hive health, timing shift between peaks of bee traffic might indicate numbers of foragers and distance to pollen/nectar source.
A fourth sensor unit is the woodpecker alarm, an external sensor, but this is not yet connected to the rest of the system. Nordic’s Thingy:52 prototyping platform is placed inside the hive to measure temperature, humidity, and air pressure. Code from the original project has been ported to support the Zephyr RTOS and includes the Adafruit itsybitsy nRF52840.
Learn more about how the data is processed and sent to cloud service for storage and visualization in this Nordic blog by Maria G.
For more content like this, visit the Nordic Semiconductor DevZone Blog.