History¶
2017¶
2017-03-18 Community Forum¶
Note
We have transitioned this section to the community forum at https://community.hiveeyes.org/c/announcements. Feel welcome to join us!
2017-02-11 Platform upgrade¶
2017-02-06 Historical data¶
We managed to publish some historical data from Markus Euskirchen, Clemens and Sepp Gruber, Markus Hies, Alexander Wilms and Frank Hartmann using the new CSV data acquisition feature. Thank you all for collecting the data and have fun exploring it!
2017-02-05 Beelogger Version 2 is ready¶
Markus Hies finished BeeLogger version 2, his RaspberryPi-based monitoring system. See also http://blog.hies.de/?p=281. Cheers! Markus is also aiming to use our backend infrastructure for measurement data collection. We are looking forward to that!
2017-02-01 TerkinData C++¶
TerkinData C++ is a convenient library for handling sensor readings. It helps to decouple the sensor reading domain from the telemetry domain in a typical data logger application. While providing a generic interface, it can serialize measurement values to CSV and JSON formats.
2017-01-31 Platform upgrade¶
Richard and Andreas upgraded the software releases on our platform server
swarm.hiveeyes.org to their most recent versions.
The upgrade worked fine, we didn’t have any issues.
Now we’re running:
- InfluxDB 1.2.0 (0.13.0 so far)
- MongoDB 2.4.10 (no change)
- Grafana 3.0.4 (3.0.2 so far)
- Mosquitto 1.4.10 (1.4.8 so far)
- Kotori 0.11.0 (0.10.10 so far)
We also added more capacity to the machine, it’s now offering four CPU cores and 2048 MB main memory. We will add more resources on demand.
2017-01-28 Testing a ESP8266 WiFi MQTT node¶
Karsten put a sensor node together with a beehive scale from Andreas Nickel on his balcony. Cheers!
2017-01-13 Community Forum¶
Welcome to https://community.hiveeyes.org/!
2017-01-11 Welcome euse!¶
Markus Euskirchen of Projekt “Bienenwaage” joins our regular meetings. It was a pleasure to meet you in person, finally!
2017-01-09 ESP8266 support for Open Hive firmware¶
The Open Hive firmware now also supports the ESP8266. Cheers, Clemens!
2017-01-01 Welcome Freifunk!¶
For measuring fine dust particulates, the Berlin chapter of Freifunk is considering using our infrastructure, see also https://wiki.freifunk.net/Umweltstation.
2016¶
2016-12-24 BEEP¶
Marten Schoonman and Pim van Gennip of the The BEEP platform get in touch with us.
2016-12-16 OSBH¶
Karsten gets in touch with Aaron of the Open Source Beehives project, see also https://community.akerkits.com/t/introduce-yourself/18/34.
2016-12-02 Adventslöten¶
Andreas Nickel visited us in Berlin and we talked about future plans regarding the beehive scale. It was a pleasure, thanks!
2016-11-17 Tweet from JP¶
Jan-Piet Mens sent a tweet about us, cheers!
Some people answered:
- https://twitter.com/sisomm/status/798893680979509248
- https://twitter.com/thisDaveJ/status/798893894612070400
- https://twitter.com/cfwhisperer/status/798905810680057860
- https://twitter.com/johanjanssen42/status/798993934487724032
Some people liked and/or retweeted it:
- https://twitter.com/draskodraskovic
- https://twitter.com/pierrecdn
- https://twitter.com/dobermai
- https://twitter.com/vernemq
- https://twitter.com/thisDaveJ/status/798893894612070400
- https://twitter.com/EomerilDunedael
- https://twitter.com/philippadelt
- https://twitter.com/kartben/status/798890788897832960
- https://twitter.com/juzam
- https://twitter.com/dr45k0
- https://twitter.com/Mainflux
2016-11-12 Valuable internet content restored¶
We restored and republished contents of beedata.com and the OSBH Forum from the Internet Archive, see
Often cited is “Listen to the Bees” by Rex Boys, a writing dedicated to the work of the late Eddie Woods. Also, some OSBH forum threads share some interests, e.g. Investigations into low-cost load cells and Load Cell Integration.
2016-11-09 Welcome, Uwe Greggers!¶
Uwe joins our regular meetings, we had some great times together.
2016-11-06 Welcome, Alexander Wilms!¶
Alexander Wilms of Stockwaage from Imkerverein Nettetal e. V. contributed the Homie-firmware based sketch for an ESP8266-based sensor node to our firmware repository. Thanks a bunch!
- https://github.com/hiveeyes/arduino/pull/1
- https://github.com/hiveeyes/arduino/tree/master/node-wifi-mqtt-homie
There’s also some documentation with schematics and more at https://hiveeyes.org/docs/arduino/firmware/node-wifi-mqtt-homie/README.html. Alexander writes about his setup at https://www.imker-nettetal.de/esp8266-beescale-erste-eindruecke/.
2016-10-23 Beehive monitoring with check_mk¶
Alexander Wilms of Stockwaage from Imkerverein Nettetal e. V. asked us to check some details of his new ESP8266-based setup using mqttwarn and check_mk.
It was a pleasure, voilà: https://github.com/jpmens/mqttwarn/pull/215
2016-10-05 Hiverize¶
Carolin Zschippig and Thorsten Kluß of the Hiverize project visited us in Berlin. It was a pleasure for us.
2016-10-01 Maker Faire Berlin 2016¶
This was great for us. We talked to many people who were interested in our efforts and progress. Thanks for stepping by!
We have been mentioned by Dave Darko, who enjoyed having a chat with us: https://hackaday.io/page/2347-maker-faire-berlin-2016
2016-09-17 Maker Faire Berlin 2016: Announcement¶
Clemens will be at the Maker Faire Berlin again, cheers! It will take place from September 30 to October 02.
See https://maker-faire.de/maker/berlin/2016/open-hive-und-hiveeyes/.
2016-09-13 Hiverize pull request¶
A minor contribution to the Hiverize project to use the Hiveeyes backend:
2016-09-03 New website¶
- We released our new website at https://www.hiveeyes.org/ and tried hard to aggregate and link to the various bits of information in a different way. Just in-time for the Stadthonigfest (see below).
2016-09-03 Stadthonigfest Berlin 2016¶
Karsten and Clemens are exhibitors at the yearly »Stadthonigfest Berlin 2016«.
See also
Karsten and Clemens at the Stadthonigfest 2016 in Berlin
Clemens made some business cards for us. Thanks!
2016-07-10 Next-generation sensor- and telemetry-nodes¶
Introduce the Generic firmware, a flexible software breadboard for sensor-, transceiver- and gateway-nodes. This is now based on the RadioHead and BERadio C++ libraries for radio transmission. For building it, we switched to the fine Arduino-Makefile.
Welcome LoRa! Cheers, Richard!
2016-07-10 Publishing time: Everything is on GitHub, finally¶
- Open Hive GSM and WiFi sensor nodes running on the Open Hive Seeeduino Stalker (GitHub)
- Firmwares for load cell adjustment (GitHub)
- BERadio, our Radio-to-MQTT forwarder (GitHub)
- Kotori, our backend system for data acquisition (GitHub)
- The Hiveeyes system documentation (GitHub)
2016-06-27 Summary of June 2016¶
- June 27: SODAQ Forum: Hive scale code
- June 19: Karsten asks for Freifunk im mauergarten
- June 18: Summary from Clemens at Measuring the weight of a beehive
- June 13: SODAQ Forum: Hive scale design
- May 28: OSCE challenge: Set up an open source bee monitoring system to which anyone can contribute and share data easily
2016-06-17 Firmware builder¶
We start building firmwares automatically from our Hiveeyes Arduino repository at GitHub.
Acquiring a firmware and programming it to your sensors node is now just a matter
of sending a HTTP POST request to https://swarm.hiveeyes.org/api/hiveeyes/$DEVICE_TOPIC/firmware.hex,
see also Firmware builder documentation for more details.
2016-06-08 Ping¶
Karsten has a nice summary about our project from a different angle, enjoy reading http://karstenharazim.de/bienenmonitoring-hiveeyes-ping/.
2016-06-06 HTTP data acquisition¶
While already consuming measurement data via MQTT, we start accepting measurements through POST requests to our new HTTP API. Data acquisition is now just a matter of:
export DEVICE_TOPIC=testdrive/area-42/node-1
echo '{"temperature": 42.84, "humidity": 83, "weight": 33}' | http POST https://swarm.hiveeyes.org/api/hiveeyes/$DEVICE_TOPIC/data
See Data acquisition over HTTP for more details and Data acquisition with PHP for an example application.
2016-06-03 Open Source Beehives starts harvesting data¶
Open Source Beehives starts harvesting data, cheers! Enjoy some impressions from rigging up the telemetry device and also have a look at live data.
2016-05-30 LoRa ahead!¶
Richard soldered a HopeRF RFM95 radio module onto a JeeLink USB adapter and started transmitting “Hello World” using the RH_RF95 driver of the fine RadioHead library by Mike McCauley of AirSpayce. Cheers!
JeeLink carrying HopeRF RFM95 radio module
Hello World over RFM95, using RadioHead
2016-05-30 Data alerts¶
The first preliminary implementation of an automatic Schwarmalarm using mqttwarn for detecting sudden weight-loss and data-loss events is ready, it will send appropriate alert notifications to beekeepers, cheers!
2016-05-26 Publishing time¶
- Huge documentation improvements for release 2016-05-26 0.4.1
- Publish Hiveeyes Arduino documentation for Hiveeyes Arduino source code
- Add Handbook about data acquisition and working with Grafana
- Add Do it yourself about how to build your own monitoring system components
- Embed and discuss some interesting events from Labhive One, see below
- Release and package Kotori 0.7.1, the universal data sink component powering the Hiveeyes backend, amongst others
- Update project History
2016-05-24 Platform upgrade¶
Richard and Andreas upgraded the software releases on our platform server
swarm.hiveeyes.org to their most recent versions.
The upgrade worked fine, we didn’t have any issues.
Now we’re running:
- Eclipse Mosquitto 1.4.8
- InfluxDB 0.13.0 (up from 0.10.0)
- Grafana 3.0.2 (up from 2.6)
- Kotori 0.7.1 (up from 0.5.1)
When upgrading InfluxDB, some database migration steps were required:
2016-05-23 Nightly weight gain? It’s raining!¶
On May 23, 2016 it started raining at 23:00 hours (note the sudden drop of temperature between 23:05 and 23:20), so the hive probably gained some weight directly or indirectly through rain water (48 kg to 49 kg between 23:00 and 23:30 hours, reaching 50 kg at 01:00 hours, all times CEST).
Q: Does the water leak into the hive? Is it the electronics not behaving due to temperature drop or humidity increase?
A: Richard revealed us that he’d put a bulky chipboard on top of the hive in order to compensate on purpose for some weight-loss due to beehive work the other day. This piece of chipboard most probably have soaked up some rain water, thus responsible for the total weight increase. :-)
2016-05-22 Harvesting¶
Robinia blossom time ahead. Richard and Laura want to make genuine Robinia honey, so they harvested the honey which is currently in the hive. You can recognize the two spots at 14:00 hours and ~20:00 hours.
2016-05-20 Schwarmalarm¶
Bam.
This is a weight-loss event from The “Beutenkarl” scale recorded on May 20, 2016 between 10:11 and 10:26 hours CEST after a bee colony started swarming at the Hiveeyes labs beehive in Berlin Wedding.
Todo
There’s a another story about catching the colony from a nearby Robinia tree. More on that later from Richard.
2016-05-19 Elektrischer Reporter¶
2016-05-18 Spring time¶
Intro¶
Data currently is measured at intervals of about 15 minutes.
In the following graphs the weight of the hive is shown with the light blue line. The temperature sensor inside the hive is shown in dark blue and the sensor at the air hole, which is in the sun most times, is yellow.
April/May 2016¶
Let’s have a look at the data. During the cold period at the end of April the beehive loses absolute weight because the bees have to live off their reserves. In contrast, the following two weeks were amazingly warm in May, so the worker bees are getting extremely busy.
From April 29 until May 13, the weight has increased by almost 14 Kg. On some days the beehive gained 2 Kg weigth due to pollen and nectar collecting.
It was the time of the fruit blossoms, so the cherry, pear and apple trees were in bloom in the nearby allotments.
2nd May¶
The beehive gained a lot of weight on the 2nd of May. After six o’clock in the morning the temperature begins to rise, at 7:15 the first sun rays shine on the entrance hole. The first scouts leave the beehive at 7:45 and at 8:15 everyone is in the air. The beehive suddenly loses 120g since about 1200 bees are leaving to harvest.
At 9:20, the ratio between the arriving and departing bees reverses and the weight increases rapidly.
Throughout the day, bees are flying in and out, collecting nectar and pollen, explore and report. Even as the beehive is in the shadow from 16:00 and the temperature starts sinking, the bee colony continues to collect until 20:00.
1800g have then carried home. It was a good warm and important day, after the long period of winter and the cold snap end of April.
2016-05-18 Release time¶
Release Hiveeyes Arduino source code for Arduino-compatible microprocessors.
2016-04-14 Elektrischer Reporter¶
Tobias Lenartz and Markus Börner from Elektrischer Reporter visit us to interview Richard about our project, the documentary will be aired on May 19, 2016.
Elektrischer Reporter Interview “#149: Vernetzte Bienen”
Markus Boerner and Tobias Lenartz in »ElRep #149: Vernetzte Bienen«
Richard Pobering in »ElRep #149: Vernetzte Bienen«
2016-04-14 Scale frame “Beutenkarl”¶
Rigging up the scale frame “Beutenkarl” at the Hiveeyes labs beehive in Berlin Wedding and connecting it to the Hiveeyes One sensor hub. The setup was pretty quick, we were finished in approx. 30 minutes.
Scale frame “Beutenkarl” with Bosche H30A single point load cell
Karsten at work
Richard is funneling the data
Data arrives
Scale frame is mounted. Back view.
Scale frame is mounted. Front view.
Weight measurements start arriving in Grafana.
2016-04-06 Arduino Forum Updates¶
Clemens gives a short overview about the progress on the Arduino Forum thread Measuring the weight of a beehive:
2016-02-16¶
Open Hive starts transmitting data. Cheers!
mqttlink++
Grafana dashboard “BER prototype #2”
2016-02-12¶
Start integrating with mqttwarn: Add feature “dynamic topic targets” to incorporate topic names into topic targets.
2016-02-04¶
Hiveeyes One starts transmitting data. Cheers!
Hiveeyes radio receiver and sender¶
Two Arduino-based nodes talk to each other using RFM69. We use the BERadio encoding for efficiently sending multiple measurement values over a 7-bit-clean communication link.
It’s a harsh environment: The maximum payload size is 62 bytes. To keep battery drain at its lowest, we want to squeeze as much data into the payload as possible to reduce the number of radio beams required to transmit collected telemetry data.
The receiving antenna, see also DIY antennas for RFM69
The first HEnode sensor node sits in a hive approx. 120 meters away in line-of-sight distance through a single tree. Transmits telemetry data over radio link.
Hiveeyes radio-to-mqtt gateway¶
A JeeLink RFM69 receiver is connected to the Gateway-JeePi, a RaspberryPi SoC machine through USB, acting as gateway and used as development and integration system. This runs the BERadio gateway subsystem, a convenient serial-to-MQTT forwarder written in Python. Also, we compile Arduino code on this machine and reprogram the devices.
Gateway with RaspberryPi and JeeLink
mqttlink++
2016-01-29¶
- Announce beta version of the Hiveeyes platform hosted on
swarm.hiveeyes.org
2016-01-03¶
Dazz starts the Hive Monitor project featuring the Hive Monitor Vagrant VM and some Hive Monitor Python scripts for playing around with MQTT and forwarding payloads between the serial interface and the Eclipse Mosquitto message broker.
2015¶
2015-11¶
Proof-of-concept telemetry platform based on Eclipse Mosquitto, InfluxDB and Grafana with Kotori 0.3.2 and BERadio 0.4.4. See upstream changes:
Further improve Hiveeyes One hardware and software
2015-10¶
Open Hive¶
Open Hive is at the Maker Faire Berlin 2015 from 2015-10-03 to 2015-10-05. Clemens Grubers “Open Hive” project was covered in The Very First Maker Faire Berlin Doesn’t Miss a Beat by Donald Bell. Enjoy reading:
Open Hive at Maker Faire Berlin 2015. Excerpt from the article «The Very First Maker Faire Berlin Doesn’t Miss a Beat« published in Make magazine by Donald Bell, October 5, 2015.
Open Hive temperature array prototype
Open Hive temperature array, prototype left with PCB, right with ribbon cable
Hiveeyes¶
Continue working on Hiveeyes One
Build upon serial-to-mqtt by Andy Piper and Didier Donsez and iterate into
- the BERadio specification, an efficient transport protocol for radio link communication. Throws Bencode into the mix of the constrained environment of RFM69 with Moteino.
- the BERadio Python library, for forwarding payloads between a JeeLink receiving data via RFM69 on a serial interface of a RaspberryPi and the MQTT message broker Eclipse Mosquitto.
Investigate SPI-Flash & Dualoptiboot for over-the-air programming
2015-08¶
- Hacking on Hiveeyes at the Chaos Communication Camp 2015 from August 13-17, 2015 in Mildenberg
- Baby steps for BERadio, first steps with Bencode on Arduino
2015-07¶
Open Hive Seeeduino Stalker prototype, see also Open Hive Shields
Open Hive Seeeduino Stalker
Open Hive Seeeduino Stalker Kit
2015-04¶
- Setup
elbanco.hiveeyes.orgas an integration server, we are running Debian 8.3 (jessie)
2015-03¶
- Clemens is collaborating with others about best-of-breed GPRS components
2015-02¶
- Start research on MQTT-SN with MQTT-SN-Arduino library
2015-01¶
Open Hive load cell platform (prototype I)
- News from Markus: http://www.euse.de/wp/blog/2015/01/bienenwaage-reloaded/
2014¶
2014-12¶
- Register domain “hiveeyes.org”
- Start the email distribution list
- Spin up Trac instance as a Wiki of the Hiveeyes project
2014-11¶
- Start working on a sensor node network based on Felix Rusu’s LowPowerLab RFM12B/RFM69 libraries.
Two nodes transmitting via RFM12B
The first characters transmitted
- News from Markus: http://www.euse.de/wp/blog/2014/11/voltaic-solar-charger-in-action/
2014-10¶
Start …
- organizing regular get-togethers
- hardware evaluation and prototyping
- architecture, concept and design
2014-09¶
- Workshop digitales Bienenmonitoring at mauergarten e.V. on September 21, 2014
2014-24¶
apidictor¶
- Dazz starts collecting information about building an apidictor at https://gist.github.com/dazz/11309904 and also prepared Python source code performing FFT-analysis with SciPy/NumPy at https://github.com/c-base/apidictor.
2014-04¶
Markus Euskirchen of Open Bee Hive has some news:
http://www.euse.de/wp/blog/2014/07/bienenstockwaage-wireless/
Open Bee Hive Scale Wireless based on the RedFly-Shield from Watterott.
Bee Hive Scale Graph: http://www.euse.de/honig/beescale/graph.php
Clemens Gruber starts the Open Hive open source beehive monitoring project
2013¶
2013-07¶
Pre-Work Talk #7 – Bees from IXDS.
In his talk “Bees Dance” Tim Landgraf reveals how robotics are involved with bees, Yair Kira presents his project “Bees Armchair” and 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.
Enjoy!
2013-06¶
Result Dataset 2013/06 Day 08-17 from Clemens Gruber of Open Hive displaying different hive temperatures, humidity, brightness, pressure and audio fft.
2012¶
2012-07¶
- The canonical Arduino Forum thread Measuring the weight of a beehive gets started
- News from Markus: http://www.euse.de/wp/blog/2012/07/ulengewicht/
2012-05¶
News from Markus:
2011¶
Markus Euskirchen of Open Bee Hive starts the „Bienenkisten-Monitoring“ open source beehive monitoring project:
- http://www.euse.de/wp/blog/2011/11/bienen-ueberwachen/
- http://www.euse.de/wp/blog/2011/12/lauschen-statt-wiegen/
- http://www.euse.de/wp/blog/2011/12/teileliste/
Clemens of Open Hive and Markus will get in touch later working on early prototypes of beehive scales.