Please note: This is a Citizen Science project for demonstration purposes only
The Beehive Monitor is based on the Arduino MKR WAN 1310 board which provides a practical and cost-effective solution to add LoRa® connectivity to projects requiring low power. More information about the setup can be found on Paul Schulzs’ GitHub
https://github.com/PaulSchulz/paeiot-sensor-one
The sensors are connected to the LoRaWAN Network and data is sent wirelessly using the Australian public class licence radio spectrum on (915Mhz) which is received by LoRaWAN Gateways dotted about Adelaide.
LoRa Devices use a specially encrypted machine code that can be accessed and decrypted over the internet by registered users of The Things Network. This can then be used by other software applications, in our case, an application called NodeRED to process the data into actions, messages or to store it in a database for later use. The database we are using, in this case, is InFluxDB which can be used by a website application called Grafana to display data in a more human-friendly graph on a website.
There are 2 Temperature and Humidity Sensors in the Beehive below the Green Line is a sensor mounted inside the hive and the Orange Line is a sensor mounted on the outside of the hive. Note, the inside temperature and humidity of the beehive is held at a constant 34C by the Bees alone regardless of the Library Temperature typically 24C. The peaks in the library temperature are when the sun comes in through the window in the morning, which also hits the hive, but this has no effect on the hive temperature.
