Warré hive scale data (scale 2)

Design and construction of the scale are presented here. The scale records date, time, temperature, Arduino voltage (not displayed) and weight every three minutes on a micro SD card. The data are uploaded about weekly to an Emoncms host. The following visualisation of the data is provided by the multigraph option in Emoncms modules.

This scale was first deployed in July 2019 under a colony that was started from a swarm in May 2012.  

How to use the multigraph visualisations

Hover the mouse pointer over the graph to reveal the control buttons top right. If necessary, scroll to the left using the '<' control button to find the end of the data. D=day, W=week, M=month, Y=year. +/- = zoom/shrink. <--> select period in data with calendar icons. Click tick to save. Point mouse pointer on any part of the curves to read the date/time and value. Dead straight lines in the data are mostly when the battery is removed for recharging, though sometimes due to failure to write to the memory card. Clicking on the data series names top left allows displaying just weight or just temperature.

Times are all GMT/UTC.

From early to late July the hive weight rose from 43 to 48 kg. Thereafter it declined to 40 kg in late September. During the ivy flow it put on about 3.5 kg and thereafter began the steady decline in weight through winter.

Data acquisition, processing, uploading and visualisation

An Arduino Uno logs the weight and ambient temperature to a micro-SD card every 3 minutes in CSV format. The CSV file is processed in MS Excel to convert the weight to kg so as to be presentable on the same scale as the ambient temperature. Due to a bug in the visualisation software which puts a peak wherever zero temperatures are recorded, any zero values are changed in Excel to 0.01 degrees. The CSV file is uploaded with PHP and appropriate script to a Linux web server already equipped with Emoncms (and its data visualisation modules), Apache (webserver), PHP and MySql (database). Once Inputs and Feeds are created in Emoncms, a suitable visualisation option is chosen and formatted, in this case Multigraph. 

Acknowledgements

I thank Jody Noury (jodaille.org) for web hosting the data and Emoncms visualisation for this project and generously providing support.

Thanks are also due to the developers of Emoncms, more about which can be found here.

 

Contact: david (at) dheaf (dot) plus (dot) com