Hiveeyes Arduino Firmwares#

PlatformIO CI outcome

» Documentation | Community Forum | Issues | Source code | Licenses

About#

This is the firmware source code documentation of the Hiveeyes project, which is developing a flexible beehive monitoring infrastructure toolkit and platform based on affordable hardware, wireless telemetry and modern software.

As a FLOSS system, it is assembled from a range of open source software and hardware components. For an overview about the whole system, please have a look at The Hiveeyes system documentation.

Please also visit the Hiveeyes Community Forum, where all development discussions are taking place. If you want to participate in one way or another, you are most welcome to join us.

Overview#

The repository includes different firmware implementations for different scenarios and use cases. The Firmware overview page enumerates all of them.

Coverage#

MCUs#

Sensors#

Telemetry transports#

Telemetry protocols#

Note

Some firmware names reflect their purpose using a naming convention like <purpose>-<transport>-<protocol>. Otherwise, please inspect their documentation and source code to find out about their ingredients more exactly.

Usage#

This repository uses PlatformIO as a build system, see About PlatformIO.

Install#

Acquire source code repository:

git clone https://github.com/hiveeyes/arduino

Build#

Select a firmware according to your needs, and build it:

cd arduino/ringlabs/bienenwaage-5.0
make build

For selecting the right firmware for your purposes, please inspect the Firmware overview page.

Upload#

To build a firmware hex file, upload it to the MCU and finally start a serial port monitor, invoke:

export MCU_PORT=/dev/ttyUSB0
make upload

# Run serial port monitor
make monitor

About PlatformIO#

For building, we recommend to use PlatformIO. Installing all dependency packages will be managed automatically, accurately, and reproducibly, because each programs’ subdirectory contains a platformio.ini file, which exactly enumerates its list of dependencies. You will be able to choose between CLI and UI operations, see PlatformIO IDE.

Note

A platformio.ini dependency list, configured per env.lib_deps setting, typically looks like this. You can see that libraries can be pulled from both packages hosted on PlatformIO, and from Git repositories.

For both variants, you will be able to specify exactly which version of the package to use (version pinning), where on Git repositories, you can refer to both tags and branches. This is very convenient for development operations, and also provides a lightweight way for bundling/shipping to production environments.

[env]
lib_deps =
    lowpowerlab/RFM69@^1.5
    lowpowerlab/SPIFlash@^101
    https://github.com/hiveeyes/aerowind-ads1231@^0.1.0
    https://github.com/hiveeyes/embencode#next

Attention

We do not recommend to use the Arduino IDE, because you will have to install all necessary libraries manually, sometimes by choosing libraries from the library manager, another time by downloading Zip archives and extracting their content to certain directories.

This procedure is error-prone, and can produce arbitrary results when building and running the firmware. It will not be reproducible, and you are on your own when running into any problems around library dependencies, or missing hardware support.

Specifically, if you are working on different projects with different sets of dependencies across MCU architectures, framework SDKs, and libraries, you will find yourself entangled in a web of unknown library dependencies, and, in order to re-gain your sanity, you will more often than not need to wipe your whole development environment or even the whole Arduino installation, and start from scratch.

Software should not be developed and assembled this way in 2023.

PlatformIO will give you peace of mind on this matters, because each project’s build environment is isolated from each other.

The PlatformIO Registry hosts packages and SDKs for 50 development platforms and >13,000 libraries. If you absolutely can’t find a specific library there, just include it with your program, or upload it to a Git repository.

If you absolutely have to use the Arduino IDE, you may want to inspect the env.lib_deps sections within the corresponding platformio.ini files, in order to learn about the required dependencies for each individual firmware.

Tip

Depending on your use case, when using PlatformIO, you may want to turn off telemetry, by running that command within the Python environment you are running pio in:

pio settings set enable_telemetry false

Sensor network telemetry#

An example scenario how a telemetry data network can look like in a multi-sensor environment. In order to learn more about the Kotori message router and data historian, visit its documentation at Kotori.

%%{init: {"flowchart": {"htmlLabels": false}} }%% flowchart LR subgraph sensors subgraph ism RF-1[RF sensor 1] RF-2[RF sensor 2] RF-N[RF sensor N] relay{{telemetry relay}} end subgraph sub1ghz LORAWAN[LoRaWAN sensor] LORA[LoRa sensor] end subgraph cellular CELL-GSM[GSM sensor] CELL-LTE[LTE M1/NB1 sensor] end gateway{{network gateway}} RF-1 --> relay RF-2 --> relay RF-N --> relay relay --> gateway TTN{TTN} end subgraph network HTTP{HTTP} MQTT{MQTT} end subgraph backend Kotori>Kotori message router\nand data historian] InfluxDB[(InfluxDB)] CrateDB[(CrateDB)] Kotori --> InfluxDB Kotori --> CrateDB Kotori --> Grafana end %% Breadboard %% Sensors LORAWAN --> TTN LORA --> gateway %% Network gateway --> network TTN --> network CELL-GSM --> network CELL-LTE --> network %% Kotori MQTT --> Kotori HTTP --> Kotori %% WS --> MQTT %% MS --> MQTT %% HS --> HTTP %% subgraph lan %% WS[Wi-Fi sensor] %% HS[HTTP sensor] %% MS[MQTT sensor] %% end