Honeybee populations in the United States have been collapsing without explanation, and although a number of theories exist regarding why this might be happening, there is very little data available to shed light on the problem. Since bees play a major role in pollinating plants, collapsing colonies are causing environmental problems that go beyond just honey shortages.
Yale Bee Space previously used Temboo to fundamentally change the way that bees are kept, designing smart hives that use sound, humidity, temperature, and weight sensors to collect and analyze data from numerous connected hives. We've expanded on their approach, using robust Texas Instruments hardware and industrial-strength cloud platforms to build an IoT solution that contributes data to the search for a solution to the bee colony collapse problem.
TI LaunchPad
Anaren Zigbee CC2530 BoosterPack
Weight sensor
Sound sensor
Humidity sensor
Temperature sensor
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It provides a simple Web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of websites, making it the perfect platform on which to store and analyze our bee data.
Utilities are Temboo Choreos that simplify everyday programming tasks and can do far more than just access APIs. Our Utility Choreos are brain-savers that simplify the common and time-consuming bits of app-building, like data conversions and formatting. In this case we're using the Email bundle to send an email report.
To get started building this application, we first made sure we could send some data to Amazon S3. This involved visiting the Amazon > S3 > PutObject Choreo in the Temboo Library and testing it out from our website. Once we had that up and running, we turned on IoT Mode and generated the code that we needed to create objects in S3 directly from a TI LaunchPad.
Next, we set up our hardware so that each hive was collecting data via the sound, temperature, humidity and weight sensors. Each hardware node was placed in a hive and periodically sent batch sensor data back to an internet-connected gateway node. The code on the gateway node adds the collected data to our Amazon S3 account using the code we generated in IoT Mode.
Once data is securely stored in Amazon, it can be accessed via any of our SDKs and used to build desktop, web or mobile apps with which melittologists can analyze the hive data.
Finally, we followed the same code generation technique described above to produce TI LaunchPad code that uses our email utility Choreo to send a daily email report. This serves two purposes 1) indicating that data is being collected as expected and 2) summarizing the daily data.
We had many choices for where to store and analyze our beehive data. Amazon S3 makes a great choice when storing batch data in files. It's extremely robust and scalable, meaning that we can roll out our hive monitoring solution to many locations without having to worry about our choice of data storage platform. However, we could have opted for a more connected architecture, streaming live data to an IoT storage and analysis platform like Xively. Xively has the advantage of giving us an analysis interface out of the box. And of course, our Xively Choreos can be used from any programming language to extract data and build custom reporting interfaces.
Managing beehives is not typically a real-time concern. However, there are significant events that could and should generate alerts. If the temperature exceeds a certain threshold, or the constant hum suddenly stops, we can configure our application to use Temboo to trigger the appropriate emails, text messages and phone calls. Additionally, we can expand the hardware footprint of this project, adding a heating and cooling system, so that we can take remote action based on the alerts that we receive.
Along with options for switching out Choreos, or enhancing the application's feature set, we could also reimplement the project using our support for Arduino hardware.
Contact us at hey@temboo.com