Beehive with smart home technology – Computer Week

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bee with Intel Edison sensor
Photo: Intel

Biologists are concerned: In some places, 90 percent of the insects that are already dead. They may consist of around a third of our food from plants that must be pollinated before to grow can. “Bee colonies worldwide die and we do not know why,” says Paulo de Souza, senior scientist at the Australian Research Centre CSIRO.

In order to capture the complexity of the deteriorating living conditions that are causing the mass extinction, CSIRO has the ” Global Initiative for Honey Bee Health “founded. Thus researchers gather around the world and be able to upload data to a central server, a beehive in a smart home will be transformed with Intel technology. “The Intel Edison Breakout Board Kit is the ideal platform for this type of research. It is incredibly reliable, small, flexible programming and consumes very little energy,” says de Souza.

Hive with Intel Edison sensors
Photo: Intel

The bees are for 2, 5 x 2.5 x 4 mm small mini-transmitters equipped, which are attached in the form of an RFID tag as a rucksack on their back. The weight of 5.4 milligrams is equivalent to only one third of what can carry the insect total. At the entrance of the hive and at checkpoints in the vicinity of which tags are then read to track the movements as well as the rest of the insects.

In addition, Intel’s Edison platform provides the ability to infect detectors and thereby the environmental conditions capture. “The sensors work in a similar manner as in the black box recorder of an airplane, and provide us with basic information about stress factors that affect the health of bees,” says de Souza. So is approximately measured, which humidity, temperature and solar radiation they are exposed. In addition, researchers can also connect your own sensors to record local features.

The Edison family is based on a single-chip system with a Pentium-compatible processor Intel Quark and WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. In addition, Intel Break Out Boards and toolkits provides, so can realize that developers and hardware manufacturers on the basis of technology new ideas and solutions for wearables and the Internet of Things.