iTRUBEC

I decided to use the combination of SONY Spresense board and SigFox network as the reliable data carrier to build a solution which fulfills all the basic requirements on remote beehive monitoring.

How does it look like?

The prototype consists of the SONY Spresense board responsible for all the computing and detailed data logging to SD card, BME280 sensor responsible for temperature, humidity and atmospherical pressure measuring, GY MAX4466 microphone module with amplifier responsible for noise level monitoring and finally SigFox modem responsible for the data transfer.

A device which allows beekeepers to remotely monitor their beehives and send an alert in case of theft. Beehives are very often located at position where there is no electricity available (nothing to say about WiFi connectivity) so it is not easy to establish some kind of reliable remote monitoring with low power requirements. Using NXP Rapid IoT Development Kit I wanted to test the concept of monitoring the beehive over SigFox network.

We wanted to monitor beehive remotely and online. You would say it is easy to use mobile data for such purpose. But there are some cons: The coverage is not good enough, not all the people do have mobile data activated, the pricing is quite high for our purpose and last but not least such solution consumes a lot of electricity causing the batter dry in a day or two.

So we did a brief research and found a network which is dedicated to IoT stuff like our iTRUBEC beehive monitor – SigFox. Sigfox ceveres 96 % of the Czech Republic area and 98 % of CZ population:

(Actual coverage could be checked at https://coverage.simplecell.eu/)

SigFox has very acceptable cost (for less than 200 CZK (8 €) can be sent up to 120 messages daily for one year, each up to 12 bytes) and the device is very efficient in the consumption. So we started to prototype.

Prototyping and testing are ongoing.