The Hiveeyes Project

Who are you?

We are a group of beekeepers from Berlin regularly meeting on wednesdays since 2014 to build a collaborative telemetry platform for beehive monitoring. We are Karsten, Robert, Clemens, Richard, Martin, Andreas and Dazz.
Feel welcome to join us.

What is it?

Hiveeyes is an open source, DIY toolkit for building beehive monitoring setups. It is modular and built upon contemporary technologies and components like Arduino, MQTT, InfluxDB and Grafana. With low-cost, low-power hardware, we aim at making non-invasive beekeeping as affordable and comfortable as possible.
It is important to us that the core backend components do not depend on any 3rd-party services to work. While available as a hosted system running on our shared platform "swarm.hiveeyes.org", it also works self-contained even on a RaspberryPi or similar System-on-a-Chip computer.

How is it going?

The roots of this project reach back into 2011, where one of its founders started researching into the topic of low-cost beehive monitoring during the advent of the Arduino ecosystem, which offered an affordable, low-barrier entrypoint to MCU programming together with a growing, vibrant community.
Early hardware and firmware prototypes were conceived in the upcoming years and finally the rest of us joined the project in 2014. After a while of planning, discussions and iterations over the efforts of the founding members, we finally reentered the main collaborative designing and building phase in 2015/2016.

And now?

We are now at the point where we nailed the components of the system and open sourced all major software artifacts required to run the whole stack, from embedded firmware to backend system components. The source code is on GitHub, so we are happy to share our efforts completely with the community and look forward to the next development iterations, now completely in the open.

Beginning autumn 2016, we will reiterate on different aspects of the software- and hardware-components, decide about which hardware route to follow and hopefully will start producing some small batches next year.
We will also put some efforts into a scientific project we were asked to collaborate with and always look forward to your feedback. There are many bits and pieces to look at and require more intensive testing. We need you!
If you are still reading, you might want to continue at the projects’ goals.

Happy beekeeping!