How to enjoy your lunch as a beekeeper
As you might know from my previous post I created HiveSUMMary – a beehive monitoring system for my father’s bee colonies. This system let’s you monitor the data by visiting a certain webpage. That’s cool but you always have to have in mind to take a look. So I had the idea of an additional dedicated display which constantly shows the latest and most important data of his beehives: HiveSUMMary E-Ink Monitor
My father has this monitor mounted just besides their lunch table as it is one of the few places that he visits several times each day. Now he can non-disruptively have an eye on his bee colonies while he is eating :-)
Features
- E-Ink display – I decided to use an E-Ink display as it is not as annoying/disruptive as a normal luminous display and it only needs power when it refreshes. In my case I used the “LILYGO® TTGO T5 V2.0” (cost around 12 Eur) based on an ESP32 microcontroller. It has WiFi/Bluetooth connectivity built in and can be programmed via Arduino IDE. I used this project on GitHub to kick off my development.
- Data – Currently I display the following data
- Environment – Temperature, Humidity, Air Pressure, Brightness (Lux) and Date/Time of last refresh
- Beehives (BL x) – Name, latest weight, daily gain/loss, weekly gain/loss, hive temperature inside hive
- Refresh interval – The device wakes up every 15 minutes, connects to WiFi to refresh the data and goes to deep sleep again so it can save energy.
- Iot Log integration – Data is pulled from Iot Log via a dedicated REST endpoint which provides the hive data.
- Iot Device Manager integration – The display is integrated into my Iot Device Manager to monitor meta data and is enabled for OTA (over-the-air) updates of its firmware.
Links
Please also check back at my fathers bees:
