Beekeepers are the first to notice the alarming disappearance of our bees. In addition to the comparatively high death rate among bees, these professionals and hobbyists sometimes have to deal with acts of vandalism and hive thefts.
In view of this, the ability to anticipate anomalies within hives has become crucial. On average, beekeepers have to visit their hives around ten times each year. However, these regular checks do not necessarily enable them to detect possible issues in time. They are also time-consuming for beekeepers and cause stress for bees.
Let’s save our bees!Actually, each year beekeepers lose on average up to 1/3 of their bee colonies. The species have been facing the threat of extinction for more than fifteen years. However, we know that bees are essential to the preservation of our planet and mankind.
The connected hives present a solution to save our bees. This ioT-based technology serves as a daily follow-up to the actual situation of bees. It helps beekeepers keep their hives safe.
Who are we ?We, a group of Sorbonne University students that specialize in electronics, have a misson which is to make this possible with the amount of technology presented under the supervision of our professors.
Our system is using LoRaWAN as a protocol and TTN as a Network that receives the data that the sensors collect. The coding part is on Arduino.
The proceess that leads to the product is quite guided. It aims mainly at enriching our knowledge in electronics and computor science. The taken steps are the following ranked orderly:
- Establish the LoRaWAN and TTN connection with the right code on Arduino.
- Elaborate a prototype with the adequate sensors and technology described in the beginning of the article ("Things").
- Create the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) of the prototype.
- Prepare an isolating housing for the system.
- Try the final product on a hive.
The Arduino MKR WAN 1310 provides a practical and cost effective solution to add LoRa® connectivity to projects requiring low power. TTN, a network that uses LoraWan, provides a set of open tools and a global, open network to build IoT applications at low cost, featuring maximum security. Arduino code needs to have a part that establishes the connection to TTN (Explained in the Code part of the project). For this purpose we need our device EUI which is the unique identifier of our board.
If needed, this is a tutorial that helps configurate TTN: https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/mkr-wan-1310/the-things-network
Prototype phase: ExampleWe try, during this phase, to connect sensors to the Arduino MKRWAN board:
It's necessary to elaborate an accurate and a functional prototype with the wiring of our choosing in order to create our customized PCB and make the code phase easier.
At this point the software we use to receive the date is "Ubidots". In order to do this, we configurate TTN using LoraWan protocol:https://help.ubidots.com/en/articles/5096476-plugins-connect-the-things-stack-to-ubidots
The complete system is realised in a way to be used on a hive, so it has to acquire certain characteristics explained in the next part of the project:
The end point of the project is to implement a system in a hive and leave it for a week to be tested. What we need in return are results related to: Temperature, humidity and weight. The system needs to be waterproof, resistant and most of all autonomous owing to the battery that it could be charged itself with the solar cell.
We replace "Ubidots" with "Beep" to receive our data: To transfer your data from TTN to BEEP, you must format the data in TNN with the "Payload Formatter" and transfer the data with a "Custom webhook" as explained in the link below: https://www.thethingsindustries.com/docs/integrations/webhooks/creating-webhooks/
Beep enables us to monitor from a distance the system acquiring all the data we need.








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