What Sparkfun components do I need? I want to connect a couple microphones, a temp/humidity/air quality sensor to a board inside the hive and transmit recordings every 15" via BLE, Wifi to the cloud. I have little electronics knowledge. Can someone suggest a configuration using SparkFun to me? Thanks
In casually browsing the topic, it’s clear that this is quite a mature field of study and there are countless beekeepers, academic researchers, and, correspondingly, commercial developers who have covered this ground.
I recommend studying, in detail, what others have done before you.
In doing so, you can incorporate your improvements into what’s already been proven successful and skip the back tracking and dead ends inherent in R&D.
By analogy, suppose someone wanted to explore the design and manufacture of human powered wheeled terrestrial vehicles with a built-in roulette wheel and fog machine. We’d suggest they begin by looking at existing bicycles. Our enterprising engineer may not ultimately use an off-the-shelf Schwinn for the party bike but they’d be wise to recognize the lack of value in ‘developing’ known dead ends like wooden wheel spokes, magnetic crank bearings, air conditioning and magnesium frames.
If you insist, I’d set aside the uniquely beehivey aspects of the project for the time being and start by making a basic T&RH logger.
Log your temperature & humidity right at your bench at the desired 15" (?) intervals with time stamps and get it pushed into your data collection apparatus (local, cloud, realtime monitors, etc). When you get that working, you have a very basic bike hive monitoring station. Expand to include the complexity of other, more interesting casino rave bike gear hive metrics: microphone buzz audio normalizers, bee-proof wiring, honey-resistant circuit boards, pollen imagers, airborne hormone/pheromone sniffers, tiny barcodes for fuzzy bee sweaters, grizzly bear & hornet event countermeasures, in-comb honey assay, (nectar + spectrum)= nectrum analysis. Say, this IS fun.
Liaifat85/brow - thanks for your question and guidance. electronic sensors have been used with/in bee boxes for approx 10 years; there are a number of scholarly (peer rev) articles about the data. Prior to my recent retirement, i worked in health care, public health, research and stats. I’m trying to develop an IoT product that will help cue beekeepers into inspecting their hives, and suggest what might be the issue. There’s no evidence that these electronic devices harm the bees in anyway and the benefit, if the product is relatively inexpensive, is significant. I have studied the existing products but take sound recordings for example. the two products on the market presume that you can put one mic on the top center of the box and that that’s meaningful. according to knowles (a leading mic producer) the mics they use have poor accuracy in the freq. range we want to measure. according to cal tech acoustical engineers and my early study with lapel mics, sounds vary just 10cm apart in the hive. there are many temp/humid sensors out there but i think only sparkfun has one with air quality. Brow-I absolutely agree with you and actually have done what you are suggesting.
I’m hoping that someone (brow?) can suggest specific sparkfun components to do the job…
Hey Sparkfun technical moderators - all I’m looking for is a basic recommendation on what SparkFun components meet my project needs (temp/humid, air quality, load/weight scale, microphone) from Your perspective. I contacted Support and they told me that moderators are “always” online during regular hours … I’ve been on 4x and can’t “find” anyone. Please advise. Thanks