My school is kind of strange. We don’t have a cafeteria, but we do have a four week course on “The Simpsons.” We don’t have a jungle-gym on the elementary playground, but we do have a half-buried firetruck. We don’t have a football team, but we do have a bee-keeping club. It’s pretty awesome.
This year I decided to do some cool experiments with honey bees. This project uses 12 temperature probes placed throughout a beehive to track the movement of honey bees over the course of several weeks. The project is completely solar powered, weatherproof, and can log months of data onto a 1GB memory card. I wouldn’t have been able to build this without the parts supplied by the bee keeping club.
Parts you’ll need (in no particular order):
- Waterproof temperature probes x 12 = $107.52
- Cable glands x 13 = $22.88
- I’m linking to the smaller size of gland, when I actually bought the larger size. While the larger size did work, you won’t have to tighten the smaller ones as much and they should work much more easily.
- Arduino = $29.95
- I used an Arduino Mega, but this was way overkill. Any Arduino will do just fine. Because I used a Mega, the code is a bit affected.
- SD card shield = $19.50
- SD Card = $9.95
- Large weatherproof enclosure box = $19.95
- 6600mAh Lithium ion battery pack = $39.50
- Yes, it’s a giant battery, but we want this thing to keep working if it rains for a few days!
- Lithium ion battery charger = $24.95
- Large, 6V solar panel = $34.95
- 3.7v to 5v boost converter = $19.50
TOTAL: $328.65 + Shipping (if you’re getting everything new)
Here’s the code I wrote for this project. Much of it was modified from existing Arduino SD card examples.
The parts for the SD card may have to change a little depending on what shield and Arduino you use. Because I used a Mega here, I had to do a bit of a work around to get the SD shield to work without modifying it, so it could probably be simplified a bit further.
Step 1: Mount the Cable Glands
The outermost cable glands had a nut on the inside that ran into one of the box’s support posts. I just cut off part of the outside of the nut to make it fit – it shouldn’t compromise the seal too badly, and the box should survive splashes from the rain just fine (hopefully this thing won’t end up entirely underwater!).
Step 2: Wire the Temperature Probes
There should only be white (signal) wires left from the temperature probes. I insulated the bottom of the terminal blocks with electrical tape so they don’t short out with each other.
Next I wired each signal wire to the SD card shield. Pictured is a Sparkfun SD card shield. In the parts list I linked to an Adafruit shield, as that’s what I recommend buying (and what I ended up actually using). The Sparkfun shield was a huge pain. Don’t use it. The Adafruit shield also has a RTC (real time clock) module built in, so we can timestamp our data points more accurately, even after power gets cut out. I highly recommend it.
Because these temperature probes work on the digital, one-wire bus system (where each probe has a unique address), all of the signal wires get tied together and brought to a single digital pin on the Arduino. I chose to use pin 3.
Then I used a 4.7K pull up resistor on the signal wires, tying them to the 5v supply on the Arduino. I also connected the power busses to 5v and ground at this time. Now you can slap your Arduino on there!
Next, I connected the power out from the USB connection on the boost converter to the DC in jack on the Arduino. Make sure to add a power switch so you don’t have to disconnect the solar panel whenever you want to program the Arduino.
I placed all of the power circuitry in an anti-static bag to avoid any short circuits.
Step 4: Programming
As I mentioned before, you’ll see an Arduino Mega pictured, but this was unnecessarily powerful for this application. In fact, a lower power chip would probably be superior. If you end up connecting more sensors, however, a Mega might be useful.
Read more: Track Honeybees With Temperature