Hello,
I have just discovered your project.
You are using raspberry Pi to do processing, do you use one for each hive ?
do you have sensors, scales connected to one Pi (over radio or wire) ?
a place for hive monitor developers to discuss Hardware and Software
Right now the architecture is one raspberry pi per hive with wired sensors. There is the hivetool.net website which can aggregate some of your data, but for the actual hives... that's the architecture.
We are working on a Pi sensor board that will accommodate 4 hives per monitor (summed cells) or read four load cells on one scale.
We hope to have it available in 6-9 months at a nominal cost.
There is a parallel design underway called HiveControl which I believe can utilize a yard controller and collect and aggregate data from many hives, Ryan would have the details.
Adrian Ogden
I have started electronic with Arduino, i was happy to read T° and humdity
(dht11 & DHT22), easily an one two three or near.
Then thinking about communication, using an ethernet shield I could not
manage to code a sketch that works for hours.
Arduino power and link were small so I have acquire a RaspberryPI like you,
It was powerfull, happy to be able to use bash, easy to have a websever with PHP.
I have believed that I have found an Arduino like with Debian, the dream.
But I have never succeed to read a sensor at all ... :-(
I have then abandonned Pi to continue with Arduino.
To connect to a network I have found users
using Arduino and leightweight router with OpenWRT.
4Mb of RAM memory size is another challenge, I have found
one with RAM upgrade, USB.
I have recently managed to read values from Arduino serial via USB,
parsing the line to build an URL and then calling a webserver that write
valuses in comma separated like file ...
https://github.com/Jodaille/LyceeDesAndaines/tree/master/ArduinoToWeb
It works at home, I have to experiment power autonomy with a solar pannel
and find a way to connect to a network in the apiary.
We think about using a 3G key (as you), the apiary is about 230m of the
college labo. We are exploring possibility to use some radio modules,
we found nice modules using atmega to :
http://jeelabs.net/projects/hardware/wiki/JeeNode
they use RFM12B to communicate to each others, they also seem
to be very power effective: more than month with little batteries.
I think we will try to use kind of modules on each hive, sending
datas to a Pi like that collect and maybe transmit every thing.
We put our small sketchs in this repository :
https://github.com/Jodaille/LyceeDesAndaines
Maybe it can help someone.