Ben Brooks is returning to beekeeping, and with the buzzy beasts comes the need to maintain them secure — utilizing a beehive monitor related to House Assistant to graph and file temperature, humidity, gentle, and weight readings.
“We (my spouse and I) have had bees on and off for practically a decade, and through that point I got here throughout the open-source mission HiveTool,” Brooks explains. “It labored effectively sufficient, however unbeknownst to me it had very just lately turn into a largely deserted mission proper as I found it. A string of a number of unhealthy seasons for our bees, and we determined to name it quits. Quick-forward to now, with a renewed motivation to present beekeeping a go once more I made a decision I positively needed to tug knowledge about our hive into House Assistant.”
This Espressif ESP32-powered hive monitor goals to maintain the honey flowing and the bees buzzing. (📷: Ben Brooks)
Reasonably than depend on HiveTool persevering with to work even after its growth had seemingly ceased, Brooks opted to recreate the performance himself — utilizing an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller working the ESPHome firmware and sending sensor readings to House Assistant for each ease of entry and the potential to automate alarms ought to circumstances require intervention.
The ESP32 microcontroller, housed in a weatherproof field, is hosted on a custom-milled PCB that additionally contains interfaces to temperature, humidity, and light-weight sensors. Load cell sensors, positioned at every nook of the hive, monitor its weight — although a hungry mouse testing a sensor with its enamel implies that the preliminary check hive is working on three load cell sensors relatively than the total 4.
“Every part labored fairly effectively and is far neater and cleaner trying than after I did this beforehand,” Brooks says of the system’s preliminary testing. “I additionally have already got a climate station at my home (which is the place the hive is positioned), so I’ve outside temperature (and rain, which I would play with too) that I can use as effectively. For the data-visualization piece, I settled on utilizing the ‘apexcharts-card’ because the native graph card has a whole lot of limitations, particularly when utilizing a number of sensors with completely different values.”
Information recorded by the hive monitor is distributed to House Assistant and displayed on a visible card for ease of commentary. (📷: Ben Brooks)
When it got here time to deploy, although, Brooks ran right into a spot of trouble with the burden readings. “Suspecting the telephone plugs (I’m utilizing a telephone line splitter to mix the pressure gauges in addition to then connecting the mixed connection to the PCB), I gave them a superb jiggle or two and bought extra cheap readings once more,” he explains, “however shortly after ended up with the identical points.
“My suspicion is that climate circumstances are sufficient to subtly change the connection properties of the telephone plugs (since they’re mainly simply held related with rigidity), and since I’m measuring very tiny modifications in resistance that is throwing my readings off measurably.”
Brooks plans to exchange the load cell system with pressure gauges, as utilized in rest room scales, to ship improved reliability, and guarantees to replace his Hackaday.io mission web page with the outcomes.
