April, 2025 #meshtastic #beekeeping #esp32 One of my hobbies includes beekeeping, and as a beekeeper, I'm always looking for better ways to monitor my bees. I started building a remote beehive monitoring system with my husband, which I'll detail further in this blog post. Earlier this year for a technical writing class I wrote my final whitepaper on the growing technology of beehive monitoring. Learning about what can be monitored, tracked, and predicted was super helpful in continuing to build the project that I had started earlier this year! You can check out my whitepaper below: [[Beehive_Monitoring_Whitepaper.pdf]] # Project Definition & Overview The easiest things to track in a beehive are the following: - Temperature - Humidity - Weight - Sound The sensors for getting started are not difficult to acquire either, so we picked out the HX711 load cells to track weight and the BME688 which measures both temperature and humidity, and has built in modules for the microcontroller we're using. Once we get those working consistently, we'll implement sound tracking. My beehive is currently on someone else's property, and we'd like to integrate the data tracking into our Home Assistant setup. Since we've been using meshtastic lately, we determined that we'll have a beehive mesh node that sends the data back to our home node over the mesh network. Our board that we're using is the Heltec V3, which is based off of an ESP32. The benefit of using Meshtastic is the ability to encrypt our data channels while still utilizing our local mesh network in our city! So we can encrypt the node's data it is sending back to us, which is helpful from a privacy standpoint. In addition to this, the mesh node needs to run off of solar power, and be sealed in a weather (and insect) proof container. # first steps Our first tests of the project were to see if we had enough sunlight to be able to charge a battery off solar power and have the node run off of it. We got a little weatherproof container and wired up the solar charging board, batter, solar panel, and mesh node. ![[image-2.png|539x673]] We set up the node in the evening, but unfortunately the node died very fast even with a full battery. My husband theorized that the node was browning out in the morning, where it would turn on with the sunlight and then shut down again or go into a deep-sleep mode due to low voltage. ![[image-1.png|524x699]] We adjusted the power settings by soldering in the battery voltage pin into the mesh node so it can safely power off the device when it reaches a dangerously low voltage. There is a [known bug](https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/issues/4555) where the HeltecV3s will wipe themselves on power loss, and must be reconfigured again, which was some of the behavior we were seeing. Since there's no solution to this yet, we'll need to retrofit some sort of deep-sleep settings, perhaps with more batteries in the case, and tweak power consumption (maybe reduce the amount of mesh pings?). With just monitoring the battery voltage, we were able to get it running long enough for it to at least send temperature, humidity, and air quality readings for most of a full day! The BME688 is plug-and-play with the Heltec V3 (as shown in the [telemetry meshtastic documentation](https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/module/telemetry/)), so it was very easy to setup within the app to get it reading and sending data back to our home node. It's heading into the rainy and winter season here now, which means it's a bit harder to keep testing the project for now. # next steps Next steps for the project include coding a custom firmware module into the meshtastic firmware for the HX711 load cells, in addition to figuring out a way to securely attach them to the beehive in a way that is straight and level to the ground.