Part 1 - BlueMix and the Internet of (50000 small) Things: An introduction to BeeSpi

Contents

Part 1: An introduction to BeeSpi
Part 2: The BeeSpi hardware
Part 3:Configuring the Pi software
Part 4: Completing the Pi software
Part 5: Finalizing the Bluemix solution

The past couple of years the fruit trees in my garden have given very poor yields and, indeed, everything else in the garden seemed to be growing below par, and I suspected that the root cause was poor pollination. As a result, I decided to install active pollinators, a.k.a. bees. After a stuttering start, I eventually had a hive up and running smoothly, albeit too late to impact the 2014 crop. I was advised that to get a second hive since that increased my chances of starting strongly in 2015 and I added that in late summer 2014. Now that we're into 2015, the hives have survived the winter and are flourishing.

Before continuing, the whole bee story is absolutely fascinating and it's well worth learning even a little of the complexities of the hive, so I'll mention a few of these as I go through the article, as in the factoid below.

Bee Factoid: The hive has only one queen who is probably better described as an egg-laying slave than a ruler. Then there are the male drones who don't contribute anything to the day-to-day functioning of the hive, and whose only function is to breed with the queen (they die immediately after doing so): they are evicted from the hive in the autumn. Finally there are the females, the workers who, as the name suggests, do all the heavy lifting, from building the comb, looking after the eggs and nursing the young, to collecting the nectar, pollen and propolis (bee super-glue).

Once I had a veritable army of gatherers lurking at the bottom of the garden, my geek instincts kicked in and I decided I needed a high-tech project that included the hive and its denizens. So what could I instrument in the hives and their potential 50000 occupants? Reading about the folk in Fontys University, who ambitiously attached RFID tags to many of the individual bees, I decided that would be much too much for one person.

So I reached out to a colleague, Andy Stanford-Clark who  is renowned for his work in this kind of thing, and he agreed that mass instrumentation was a bit ambitious, but that other sensors would be achievable and useful. So I decided to deploy my under-utilised Raspberry Pi, and learn how to interface various sensors into the mix: the BeeSpi was born.

Because there are so many pieces to this project, I'll simply make this a series, posting the information when I get a chance, although I hope to complete it fairly quickly.

To give you an idea of what I want to achieve, see the current version of the site: beespi.mybluemix.net.

This series of blog entries continues in the post about the hardware.