beehiveCtrl

Brief

This project can be interesting for amateur beekeeping. The project is designed to monitor the temperature and control the heating of beehives remotely. The device and software can also be used to control temperature control in other projects, such as an incubator.

The device is based on the microcontroller ESP8266 and firmware NodeMCU.

Features

• Remote control the temperature in the hive via browser on your computer, smartphone, tablets
• Remote set the parameters of heater (minimal and maximal temperature)
• Transfer of the temperature and the current status of the heater to the thingspeak.com every X minutes
• Builds the charts
• Once set up, the device can work offline, without internet connection.

Schems and Circuit board

Directory board contains schematic and circuit board of device developed in EAGLE. The scheme is very simple. It consists the power regulatots (LM7805 and 1117S33) for the relay coil and microcontroller. To switch on the relay a driver is used the BC546 transistor.

Source code

Directory src contains the source code of the project, wroted on Lua and based on NodeMCU API.

How to build

1. Build the board according to the schematic diagram showed on board/BeeTermostat.sch
2. Connect +12-18V power to X1 connector on your board without installing the ESP8266 and check the correctness of the voltage at the points of the circuit where the power of the microcontroller must be approached. It should be the "3.3V".
3. Power off your board, install the ESP8266 to the socket on the board, and connect the JP3 (TX,RX,GND) connector to the computer via USB-TTL adapter. For example, you can use this device for that.
4. Power on your board and check the WiFi new access points in you environment. You should discover a new access point with a default name (installed by Expressif ).
5. Build and download the NodeMCU firmware from the nodemcu-build.com Choose the following modules:

• DS18B20
• file
• GPIO
• net
• node
• 1-wire
• timer
• UART
• WiFi
• float

6. Install the NodeMCU firmware to microcontroller. Under Linux you can use the esptool (read this esp-linux-guide for that. Example of install:

$ sudo ./esptool-master/esptool.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 460800 write_flash --flash_size 32m -fm dio 0x00000 ./nodemcu-master-10-modules-2017-09-25-18-22-58-float.bin

7. Install the ESPlorer or some another tools for working with NodeMCU to your computer.
8. Upload the lua scripts from directory src to your ESP microcontoller by using the ESPlorer or some another tools.
9. Restart module, find new WiFi access point beehive and try to connect to this AP with password 11111111. You can change SID and password before in the src/bc-init.cfg.
10. If connect is successfull, try to open http://192.168.2.1 in your browser. You sould see the page with configuration of your beehive controller.
11. Try to change the temperature settings and check your heater.