Yet more Bee research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: WaggleNet.
This spring undergraduate students report a neat project, implementing an ad hoc sensor net to measure the conditions in Bee hives [1].
The students pulled contemporary technology; low cost, low power computers, radios, and sensors, to implement an inexpensive package suitable to drop in to beehives in the field. The datastreams ping pong from one node to another until they find a router and finally reach an internet connected data repository. The data can be analyzed to monitor the environment and other aspects of the bee environment.
The prese release notes that this is an interesting project for several reasons. The initial idea is driven by a “customer”, a bee keeper who wants to monitor the bees over winter. The technology requires solving the whole end-to-end problem which includes not only the electronics, packaging, and networking, but also dealing with the real world of bee hives.
This is an undergraduate project, and nicely done. It’s fine that it isn’t exactly ground-breaking. But let me drop some links to other work they may want to look at.
This is a great age of sensornets and “smart farming”.
There probably have been many, many beehive sensing projects (not to mention zillions of agricultural sensing designs. I know of at least one project in Utah that is extremely similar to WaggleNet.
The team expresses a desire to make this available to beekeepers everywhere.
I certainly encourage the effort to make an open source version. I’ll note the “open source hardware” movement as one place to publish it (e.g., see this, this, this, this, this, this, as well as things like Instructables which has dozens of DiY bee hives and gazillons of DIY sensor projects). Publishing the whole thing, hardware, software, instructions will take considerable work. (Contact me if you want some help organizing all this.)
On another front, I’ll point out that if this is to be really used in the world, it wil probably need to be (re-)built with solid security. if the data is ever to be trusted the system has to be secure. For that matter, it is important that the sensors and network cannot be hijacked to spy on people or invade other networks.
I know that this product seems harmless and not worth hacking, but unfortunately, that’s just not good enough. (If the team has any dreams of commercial products, then they really, really need to make things secure from A to Z.)
Again, this is a very nice piece of work. Making a real produce and/or publishing an open source version will require even more work, and collaborations with additional experts.
- Heather Coit, Students Develop Beekeeping IoT for Renowned Research Lab, in Ilinois Enginering – News. 2018. https://engineering.illinois.edu/engage/wagglenet.html
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