Sensor success! Measuring Hive Temperature and Humidty

Finally. Sensor success! After of hours and hours of wrestling with hardware and software and trying to make my old brain understand stuff that millions of people already get- which is basically, how to program a simple microcontroller to read sensor information and feed it back to a computer in a useful format- finally, I made some breakthroughs and I am ready to install.

Basically, I wanted to do what any geeky beekeeper wants to do- to gather data, and use some sensors to do it. I've played with more analog versions of this, but using a microcontroller (in this case, an Arduino), to do this, seemed the easiest way (short of spending thousands of dollars and ordering a ready made system).

Well, it wasn't easy. And seemed to be this enormous rabbit hole of weird code languages and tiny parts and little wires and way too much information by people who know way more than I will ever know. The Arduino sensor project started turning into this black hole, sucking in time I was sort of thinking I dedicate to do some art, or something useful.

My workstation in the midst of this project. Cleaned up.

But-a breakthough today- figuring out an old-school way to connect sensors, and running though a host of errors in writing the code for it, though really, at a very basic level... and finally, after many hours- I can put a sensor in a hive, or many sensors in many hives- and get back data. AND MAKE A GRAPH.

Which apparently will tell me something. I have no idea what.

Which also, I actually haven'd done yet- so the actual data gathering has only worked on my table (above). Today I will make more sensors, and put 4 or 5 into hives. When I get a graph, I will celebrate.

This shows my own special contribution to making sensors- which is to use 4 wire RJ11 modular phone jacks, and splitters- all easy to find- and cheap phone wire. In this photo- the Arduino on the left, very simple wiring, and on the right, sensor ends that I am testing in a vise. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out the wiring part. Coming from the Arduino is a fat wire, which feeds two sensors. However,  I am replacing this with a CAT V wire, which I hope to feed to up to six sensors, in one wire. And all with phone jacks. Super clever!

All this is about data. Not being a Scientist, nor doing anything particularly original, sort of makes this data fairly useless, and the whole exercise just another pointless hobby- and that's sort of a bummer- but what the hell! Fun! Especially if you are a 55 year old boy scientist and somehow think that graphing the temperature and humidity in each hive will somehow give me some sort of info that will change how you take care of your bees. I think the chances of that are slim- but at least I'll know. My real interest is in getting hive weights- so this is sort of a step toward that (those sensors are more costly, and limited to certain weights).

Who cares!

This kind of thing (I encouragingly tell myself) is about gathering  skills to do stuff that I would not ordinarily do- so in case, in life, I am ever called upon to use them, I will be able to. For example, if there were a lotto for astronauts, and I was selected, and they had an Arduino on board, and it needed work- well, maybe I'd know enough to help. I have lots of these skills I think- mostly half remembered (I dimly recall how to TIG weld, for example), and so this is just one more. If my brain were photographic or something, and skills built on skills, that would be great. It feels more like skills slip out as soon as a new one comes in, and they all sit in a sieve (my brain).

That's all an aside! Time to make more sensors and get out there!

This is the other end of the sensor. They are cheap, somewhat inaccurate, DHT11 sensors (better are the DHT22 sensors, which just require one line). I hook them to phone wire using female-to-female connectors- paying close attention to which wire connects to which in the phone line- then housing the hole thing in shrink tube- so it looks like the black wire in the middle (with the sensor removed).