The Hiveeyes Project

We are developing a flexible beehive monitoring infrastructure platform and toolkit based on affordable hardware, wireless telemetry and modern software. Open source, open hardware and a friendly community.

  • About
    Introduction Technology Gallery Contact
  • Project
    Announcements News In the press Team
  • Live data
    Grafana dashboards Data feed
  • Community
    Forum Welcome on board! Platform
  • Development
    GitHub License
  • Documentation
    System Firmware BERadio telemetry Kotori backend All together

Hiveeyes in a nutshell

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!

-- The Hiveeyes Team.

Architecture, design and foundation

Design

Philosophy and non-functional attributes of the system
  • Open source

    Free software and hardware licenses like GNU GPL, AGPL and CERN OHL.

  • Self-hosted

    No vendor or on-demand-service lock-in effects.

  • Multi-tenancy

    Run it on your own or for communities of any size.

  • Do it yourself

    Feel free to customize and improve any part of the system.

Software

Contemporary, open source software components all over the place
  • Kotori

    A multi-channel, multi-protocol data acquisition and graphing toolkit.

  • Eclipse Mosquitto

    A message broker that implements the MQTT protocol.

  • Grafana

    A feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor. Plays well with InfluxDB.

  • InfluxDB

    A time series database suitable for realtime analytics and sensor data storage.

  • MongoDB

    A document database designed for ease of development and scaling.

  • mqttwarn

    A powerful, pluggable notification system for MQTT.

Hardware

Low-cost, low-power hardware components
  • Arduino

    A popular do-it-yourself microcontroller computing platform based on Atmel AVR.

  • Atmel/Microchip AVR

    Low-power 8-bit RISC single-chip microcontrollers.

  • Espressif ESP8266

    Low-power, low-cost Wi-Fi chip with 32-bit Tensilica MCU and full TCP/IP stack.

  • HopeRF

    Sub-GHz RF transceiver modules RFM69 and RFM95.

  • GPRSbee

    GPRS/GSM expansion board.

  • Bosche H30A

    Load cell module.

Technologies

Use the right tools for the job
  • MQTT

    A machine-to-machine (M2M, IoT) connectivity protocol and software bus.

  • Twisted

    A powerful, event-driven networking engine.

Gallery of hardware and software components, diagrams and features

Open Hive Seeeduino Stalker

Open Hive Seeeduino Stalker

with GPRSBee module for GSM telemetry and custom connector shield.

Open Hive Box

Open Hive Box

Open Hive Seeeduino Stalker, boxed.

Open Hive Scale Parts

Open Hive Scale Parts

Asymmetric-design hive scale with Bosche H30A load cell, unassembled.

Open Hive Scale

Open Hive Scale

Asymmetric-design hive scale with Bosche H30A load cell, assembled.

Open Hive Kit

Open Hive Kit

Solar-powered sensor node.
GPRSbee module and custom connector shield.
Asymmetric-design hive scale with Bosche H30A load cell.

Open Hive Temperature Array

Open Hive Temperature Array

Temperature array for multi-point temperature measurements.
Two different implementations: Left with PCB, right with ribbon cable.

Beutenkarl Scale Frame

Beutenkarl Scale Frame

Steel-made, symmetric-design scale frame
with Bosche H30A load cell, assembled.

Beutenkarl Scale Frame at LabHive One

Beutenkarl Scale Frame

Scale frame at the »LabHive One« beehive, mounted.

Harvesting period April/May 2016

Harvesting

Harvesting period April/May 2016 recorded from »LabHive One« and displayed in Grafana.

Schwarmalarm event on May 20, 2016

Schwarmalarm

A »Schwarmalarm« event on May 20, 2016 from »LabHive One«, displayed in Grafana.

Data-loss event notification on July 8, 2016

Data-loss notification

A data-loss event notification email was triggered by »mqttwarn«.
The reason was connection-loss on the gateway machine.

Firmware builder

Firmware builder

Acquire firmware with flexible build- and configuration parameters without having a build chain installed.

Radio communication path









Radio communication

RF69 and RF95 radio communication using BERadio protocol with Bencode serialization.

WAN communication path









WAN communication

MQTT- and HTTP-based data acquisition.
InfluxDB storage and Grafana visualization.
Event notifications through mqttwarn.

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Hiveeyes in the press

Clemens talks about Open Hive

IXDS Pre-Work Talk about “Bees”

Beekeeper Clemens Gruber shares how he gets insights from his beehive through computer based monitoring in the “Open Hive” project. Clemens starts talking at 26:00 minutes.

Watch...

July 2013

Workshop digitales Bienenmonitoring

Workshop digitales Bienenmonitoring

Beekeeper Karsten Harazim encourages building a local community:

liebe mauergärtner*innen, liebe imker, liebe nerds, liebe menschen.

wir möchten über den winter in einer workshopreihe mit ca 10-15 terminen, ein funktionierendes monitoring für eines unserer bienenvölker im mauergarten entwickeln und konstruieren. [...]

Read more...

September 2014

Open Hive at Maker Faire Berlin 2015

Maker Faire Berlin 2015

Beekeeper Clemens Gruber (Open Hive) was featured in the article »The Very First Maker Faire Berlin Doesn’t Miss a Beat« by Donald Bell.

Enjoy...

October 2015

Richard Pobering talks about Hiveeyes

Elektrischer Reporter 149: Vernetzte Bienen

Beekeeper Richard Pobering talks about the Hiveeyes project in »Elektrischer Reporter 149: Vernetzte Bienen, Fahrradlobbyisten und Spielausgrabungen«.

Enjoy...

May 2016

Open Hive Beehive Monitoring System

Maker Faire Berlin 2016: Open Hive und Hiveeyes

The Open Hive and Hiveeyes projects at the Maker Faire Berlin 2016.

Read more...

September 2016

Contact the Hiveeyes project

How to get in touch?

We are happy to hear from you!

Please join our forum at
https://community.hiveeyes.org/

or write an email to
hello[aet]hiveeyes.org.

© Copyright 2013-2021, The Hiveeyes Developers. CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Last update: April 20, 2019. Version 0.5.2.