BeeHiveor

Inspiration

The topic of the hackathon was “Earth day” and we were thinking about creating something ecological or something that would help our environment. Then we remembered the quote of Albert Einstein - “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.” And the beekeepers came to our mind so we decided to make the life of their job easier and make tracking beehives possible right from their house.

What it does

BeeHiveor helps beekeepers to track data from beehives, such as filling of frames with honey, whole honey production of hives, temperature on the honey level and the level where bees are situated. It allows you to see all the hives on the map and measurements from them in real-time. You can also see some more detailed information like the approximate number of bees and the weight of the hive.

How we built it

We took use of NodeRed application to build a backend which is listening to the mqtt topics to process data coming from ESP32. Data is processed and saved to the influxdb database. One ESP32 represents one hive and collects data from temperature and humidity sensors. We are also measuring the weights of every honey frame and the weight of the hive. Based on those weights, we predict the time to collect honey and swearing. Data is shown on the Grafana dashboard where you can see general info about all hives and also info about the particular hive.

Challenges we ran into

technologies - We had major issues with ESP32, micropython and idea, how to connect more devices into one i2c bus (more load sensors -> hx711 -> master device esp)
data analysis and math behind all those predictions which was the main part of our solution
reading real-time data
covid19 :) the whole time we had to communicate over the internet which is not as productive and enjoyable as communicating ...
multilingual team experiences (slovak, english, ukraine, mainly english)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First of all, we are proud that we were able to think of an idea that could help beekeepers to make their life easier and create easier access to their hives by monitoring hive’s main metrics. We are also satisfied that we created the solution in that short time and made it possible to work it properly even in the covid conditions. One of the biggest achieves is data analysis which we are using only small amount of sensors which tracks bees behavior and we can "predict" pretty cool stuff! We can predict how much time it takes to fill honey frames, monitor honey and predict when is the best time to collect honey with best quality. Another pretty solid solutions are against bees swarming which helps beekeepers to monitor their hives in the right time!

Sms and email notification

What we learned

how the hives are build and what they consist of
interesting information about bee life and which information may be needed for beekeepers
development using docker and used technologies
one SMS from 46elks costs 0,07€

What's next for BeeHiveor

The next step would be making information easily accessible - creating a mobile version of the application. So the beekeeper would always have access to the needed information. We would like to add more features inevitable for beekeepers. The information would be added after communication with a number of beekeepers that would ensure which data are important in their everyday life in taking care of bees. Some of the future improvements could be adding GPS sensors to hives and have a program adjustable for a certain number of hives that beekeepers need. Help hobby beekeepers rise their Bee empire!