Asteroids

Max Justicz

Honey Bee Tracking Box

Written by Max

on September 29, 2012

Filed under project

Data analysis coming soon!

My school is kind of strange. We don’t have a cafeteria, but we do have a four week course on “The Simpsons.” We don’t have a jungle-gym on the elementary playground, but we do have a half-buried firetruck.

We don’t have a football team, but we do have a bee-keeping club. It’s pretty awesome.

This year I decided to do some cool experiments with honey bees. This project uses 12 temperature probes placed throughout a beehive to track the movement of honey bees over the course of several weeks. The project is completely solar powered, completely weatherproof, and can log months of data onto a 1GB memory card. I wouldn’t have been able to build this without the parts supplied by the bee keeping club. Thanks, Magnus!

Parts you’ll need (in no particular order):

Waterproof temperature probes  x 12 = $107.52

Cable glands x 13 = $22.88

I’m linking to the smaller size of gland, when I actually bought the larger size. While the larger size did work, you won’t have to tighten the smaller ones as much and they should work much more easily.

Arduino = $29.95

I used an Arduino Mega, but this was way overkill. Any Arduino will do just fine. Because I used a Mega, the code is a bit affected.

SD card shield = $19.50

SD Card = $9.95

Large weatherproof enclosure box = $19.95

6600mAh Lithium ion battery pack = $39.50

Yes, it’s a giant battery, but we want this thing to keep working if it rains for a few days!

Lithium ion battery charger = $24.95

Large, 6V solar panel = $34.95

3.7v to 5v boost converter = $19.50

TOTAL: $328.65 + Shipping (if you’re getting everything new)

Here’s the code. The parts for the SD card may have to change a little depending on what shield and Arduino you use. Because I used a Mega here, I had to do a bit of a work around to get the SD shield to work without modifying it, so it could probably be simplified a bit further.

First, I measured and drilled holes for the 13 cable glands. 5 on each side with two on the front for the temperature probes, and one on the back for power.

The outermost cable glands had a nut on the inside that ran into a support post. I just cut off part of the outside of the nut to make it fit – it shouldn’t compromise the seal too badly, and should survive splashes just fine. Hopefully this thing won’t end up entirely underwater.

After that I brought the end of each temperature probe through its gland.

Then I began wiring up the buses that will power all the temperature probes. I had some extra screw-terminal blocks around, so I put them all in a row and soldered the leads together to make two buses: one for 5v, one for ground.

There should only be white (signal) wires left from the temperature probes. I insulated the bottom of the terminal blocks with electrical tape so they don’t short out with each other.

Next I wired each signal wire to the SD card shield. Pictured is a Sparkfun SD card shield. In the parts list I linked to an Adafruit shield, as that’s what I recommend buying (and what I ended up actually using). The Sparkfun shield was a huge pain. Don’t use it. The Adafruit shield also has a RTC (real time clock) module built in, so we can timestamp our data points more accurately, even after power gets cut out. I highly recommend it.

Because these temperature probes work on the digital, one-wire bus system (where each probe has a unique address), all of the signal wires get tied together and brought to a single digital pin on the Arduino. I chose to use pin 3.

Then I used a 4.7K pull up resistor on the signal wires, tying them to the 5v supply on the Arduino. I also connected the power busses to 5v and ground at this time. Now you can slap your Arduino on there!

As I mentioned before, you’ll see an Arduino Mega pictured, but this was unnecessarily powerful for this application. In fact, a lower power chip would probably be superior. If you end up connecting more sensors, however, a Mega might be useful.

Next I began the wiring for the power supply. This was really simple. After soldering the large capacitor onto the charging circuit (leaving lots of extra lead so that it could save space by bending the capacitor over), I connected the charger’s load output to the boost converter, and the 6V charger input to the solar panel. I also extended the solar panel’s wires; this ensures that when we bring the box out to the hive we can place the solar panel somewhere with as much sunlight as possible.

Next, I connected the power out from the USB connection on the boost converter to the DC in jack on the Arduino. Make sure to add a power switch so you don’t have to disconnect the solar panel whenever you want to program the Arduino.

I placed all of the power circuitry in an anti-static bag to avoid any short circuits.

It’s done!

This was a pretty fun, straightforward project. I will make a post soon with some analysis of the data we collect from the hive. It should be pretty interesting!

8 Responses

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Putyn says:

October 1, 2012 at 7:57 am

its a bit expensive only for measuring temperature

also the DS18B20 its a pretty precise (and expensive) temperature sensor i think you could have just used the inexpensive lm35 sensor and to reduce the number of ADC channel an simple analog mux

anyway nice (expensive) project

Reply

Olli says:

October 2, 2012 at 8:55 am

If you aren’t a beekeeper it really seems like it’s an very expensive but temperature measurements in the hive give you a lot of insights. For example you can see where the bees are located, how big is the bee cluster, where is the breed and many other things a beekeeper wants to know without opening the hive.

Just take a look at http://www.mietz.imkerforum.de/technische_umsetzung.html – this a similar project

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Michael says:

October 2, 2012 at 1:52 pm

Hallo,
the description of the project is available in english language too.
Please visit and have fun!
http://mietz.imkerforum.de/the_idea.html
Btw: I didn’t use DS18B20

Best regards
Michael

Reply

Ken Meyer says:

October 1, 2012 at 8:54 am

Hey Max, great work!

I’m working on a similar project to monitor hive temperature and weight next year so I can add hive weight data to NASA’s Honey Bee Net program ( http://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/ ).

I’ve skipped most of the weatherproofing as bee hives aren’t generally dripping wet inside. This lets me design in 9 DS18B20 temp probes per box for significantly less than a single waterproof temp probe (order in bulk on ebay for great prices direct from China). Of course, it’s not uncommon for honey to drip down between frames, so I might find the network shorted out at some point, but I’m betting that some heat shrink will protect the sensors from the rare drop of honey until the bees suck it back up.

I originally designed the hive to log to an SD card, but I’ll have real-time access to the data (and notice if anything is wrong) by logging the data directly to the web. This isn’t too expensive if the system is within a few hundred feet of an electrical outlet as you can use XBee repeaters ($25 each) to transmit the data to the nearest ethernet network via a ConnectPort X2 ($100). You could even log directly to a computer and skip the ConnectPort if you want to mess with programming and deal with power outages (restarting the computer).

Finally, weight is one of the most useful data in the summer, and I’d strongly suggest adding a scale for next spring if you can. I’ve got a $160 scale that “just works” in that you send it a short string “G\r\n” on one wire of a serial cable and it sends back around 10 ASCII characters giving the weight. It takes 9V DC power and as an industrial scale, it’s stable over a wide temperature range.

I bought an industrial scale I knew would work (from previous work) but I’ve seen some very similar scales as cheap as $80 that should work just as well, and you could go as low as $50 if you get a cheap version that doesn’t have a serial cable (meaning you’d have to hack the scale to read out weight).

I plan to house all the electronics (except the temp probes) under the hive in a shallow super-sized box. With an overhanging cover, it should be able to stay dry while allowing the scale to function (unless the area floods of course).

I run the whole thing with an Arduino Fio that goes into sleep mode via the “narcoleptic” library and draws very little power between measurements. I’d originally specced an Arduino Uno, but the power consumption of just the DC regulator really kicks up the cost of the solar panels!

I’ve got the system running on a breadboard, and I’m about ready to start putting holes into the expensive scale, but my scope creaped when I saw the instructable on bee counting! I’ve been talking to Tom and we have some ideas to bring down power consumption, and we’ll see where that goes.

I’d love to chat more — send me an email if you’re interested. I’ll also be looking at your code (thanks for posting it! I’m pretty new to Arduino, and my coding gets much better every time I see something similar to what I’m doing! I guarantee I’d learn a lot just seeing how someone else solved the same problems I face!

Thanks for the great photo documentation!

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dusan maletic says:

October 1, 2012 at 4:48 pm

Could you please post here and/or e-mail me the make and model of the scales you have used and expect to be usable (including those that require the hacking)…?
Thanks!

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