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Integration with Bee Hive Health Monitor

A project log for Climate & Environment Monitoring Station

Create a monitoring station to measure weather, soil, seismic, solar, magnetic, and gravity conditions - focus best accuracy/dollar w/COTS.

sparksronsparks.ron 04/23/2019 at 17:100 Comments

Bee hive health is tightly linked to weather conditions. I am now beginning to ensure this Climate Station integrates seamlessly with our Bee Hive Health Monitor project.

This new project as well as the ready availability of inexpensive ESP8266 modules has changed the system approach needed for the Climate Station. It is now obvious that the wind direction, anemometer, and rain gauge all need to be remote to the rest of the fixed weather sensors. That requires some form of linking and a separate module/power system.

These requirements have moved the objectives for the system. In no particular order, they are:

A. Set up a wireless link (ad hoc WiFi) for remote sensors to use to report data

B. Use a single board computer (SBC), like Raspberry Pi as the "base" station. That can then communicate out to the world by either wirelessly or wired Ethernet.

C. Continue to strive for best valance of value vs absolute accuracy in the sensors.

D. Move some preliminary calculation to the edge sensors' MPUs. For example, dew point and heat index. These can be more rigorously calculated or compensated, if required, in the base station before final transmission.

E. Use the MQTT protocol for all data interconnects, do round robin data storage in the NVRAM of the MPU for backup in the case of broken WiFi linkage or station outage.

F. Power supply and solar design is now more complicated due to the distributed nature of the system. Where possible use LiFePO4 batteries. This means more complicated battery management systems (BMS) and voltage regulators (buck or boost or both).

G. Probably most important are reliability, repeatability, and simple maintainability.

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