We have been working on a project for a year to develop an affordable solution for monitoring beehives. The project includes a hive scale, a camera that takes pictures once per hour and a statistics server that collects data in the local WiFi network. A Homey APP has also been developed in connection with the project that accesses the statistics server and shows status and statistics. The project requires some technical expertise. If anyone is interested, I can post more information.
Hi Jan-Ivar,
Could you post some links here where more information can be found?
Hi.
This was a project that I carried out together with my son-in-law. The
plan was to post the project online, but I got no response when I posted
it on the Homey Community. I therefore dropped at the time to post the
information. The project consists of a weight/temperature device based
on an ESP32S3 IOT module that sends information once per hour to a REST
web service, the web service is developed in Java and can be run
independently on a small Linux server or equivalent (I myself have run
on a Rasberry PI 5 with Ubuntu). The scale is now standing for the third
year on my son-in-law’s beehives and is working excellently. If it is of
interest I can collect more information and send it to you. It must be
noted that the project does not consist of ready-purchased (ready-made)
devices, but must be built from scratch.
Jan-Ivar
Especially finding an outdoor scale is very expensive (a few hundred Euro). I dont mind fiddling with firmware/software, but I would like to find a scale for around 50 euro’s without the need to do metal works.
The scale we developed had to be able to support a large beehive. We first tried a base of wood, and four simple (cheap) weight units (50kg). This solution was completely unusable and the result was to weld 2 H frames and use a quality weight sensor. The cheap sensors could not withstand continuous weight. The price for an ESP32S3 is about 8-10 Euro (from China) and the load cell with interface about 30-50 Euro depending on the manufacturer (200kg). I can share software for both web server and ESP32.
Thx. But that is my problem. I dont have a workshop to make my own scale hardware. And even worse: I’m not a handy man. The only tool I can work with is my laptop.
