# Arduino Bee Projects?



## WLC (Feb 7, 2010)

I'm surprised that you didn't consider the SD card shield.

Sounds like you're cooking with gas.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

I considered it, I just didn't spring for everything at once. Likely I'll get one but the question is just where will it go. For the first few months I'll be using the UEIDAQ cube, which has its own SD card slot.

The place I ordered the stuff from is my favorite surplus house, but they don't have a full line of shields. I need to get tight with the Arduino community so I don't reinvent the wheel. I know a strain conditioner project was done at least once ... my computer had a fit when I tried to visit the virus-infested website.

I may have 3-4 of these rigged up around the cabin in the long run. One on the apiary doing apiary-readings, another on the solar heating setup for the cabin, another on a weather station, and then one indoors doing the logging. Ethernet shields are available, I notice.

But I've got a steep learning curve to kill first. For one thing, I've barely stuck a toe into the C programming language ... more at home with Pascal, or even Assembler. But this will make me finally learn it. Fortunately a lot of code is written, and I will have plenty of examples to learn from.


----------



## Gilligan (May 8, 2013)

I have a few arduino boards sitting around... Just my projects are too simple to test my programming skills, but I invent a few tasks here and there to try... Just not enough time now.


----------



## McBee7 (Dec 25, 2013)

Thanks Phoebee for the electro-technical forey into the wooden box---
I'm semi literate in the arduino world, so keep it simple for folks like me.....
For me I need #1-humidity (dew point) inside and out of the hive
#2-temp, inside and out
#3-possably, the scale.......
wireless would be great, but for starters, just a few items to take out some of the huge (for me)
questions I have concerning weather inside the box....Keep us posted and thanks again....

==McBee7==


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Here's the temperature/humidity sensor I just ordered. Only 8-bit but cheap, $5.95.

http://www.mpja.com/Temperature-Hum...duino-Compatible-Sensor/productinfo/30287 MP/


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

I see a lot of people have tried weather stations. This one looks pretty complete, although some of its features are not exactly what I want. But way cheaper than a lot of off-the-shelf systems. I'll have two pyranometers to add to it for my solar projects ... sunshine data would be good for the bees, as well.

http://www.osengr.org/WxShield/Web/WxShield.html#Links


----------



## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

@Phoebee:

Are you on the BEE-L list serve group? This morning there was an announcement and call for papers for a specialty conference to be added on to the Western Apicultural Society's meeting on Sept 18-19.

The Conference will be covering: This is the First Call for Papers, Exhibits, andDemonstrations of Hive AND Bee Monitoring Methods, Equipment, and Research. Topic Areas include, but are not limited to:Scale Hives, Hive Sensors, Hive Communications (wireless, phone, and satellite),Infrared Imaging of Hives and Bees, Bee and Colony Acoustics, RadiofrequencyIdentification Tags for Bees and Hives, Bee Tracking and Mapping Using Sound, Video,Harmonic Radar, Radar, or Lidar. 

This sounds right up your alley.

The contact person (for papers and conference info): is Jerry Brommenshenk, email [email protected]

Enj.


----------



## mdax (Apr 29, 2013)

I've been considering using an electric imp connected to a hacked scale. Just now getting solar and the temp sensing imp set up. I'd love to hear how your efforts on reading data from the walmart scale go!


----------



## DMLinton (Sep 23, 2013)

Great stuff, Phoebee!

I am planning on putting some Arduino based hive monitoring systems in my bee house(s). I have a handful of each of DHT22 humidity sensors, DS1820B temperature sensors and a few Arduino Unos to get started. I picked up a few MDG Mini (ruggedized) netbooks to use for communications - just because it is so easy and I bought the netbooks for less than the Arduino communications modules. I also have a few old Panasonic Toughbooks (Win98 vintage) laying about that might get put back into service if I run out.

While it is easy enough for me to assemble the above hardware, do the coding and transmit the data to my home office, the electronics design and assembly for DIY hive scales are way beyond my capabilities. A scale under every hive would be ideal. If someone could put together a signal conditioning module to convert load cell output to Arduino usable signals, folks like me would haul out their wallets. My economics suggest that having real time hive weights would be worth over $50 CDN ($45 US at the moment) per hive.

On the scale resolution, I would suggest that a scale with a very high probability of being within plus/minus five pounds accuracy would be good enough for production hives. Hence, plus minus a half pound accuracy would probably better than ideal.

On a side note, a university in the US midwest has patented electronic beehive monitoring so putting together complete monitoring systems for sale would not be very lucrative. Not sure if a hive scale alone would infringe.

Keep us posted, Phoebee. I think that more than a few of us are interested in electronic hive monitoring.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

mdax said:


> I've been considering using an electric imp connected to a hacked scale. Just now getting solar and the temp sensing imp set up. I'd love to hear how your efforts on reading data from the walmart scale go!


All I use from the Walmart (a Health-o-Meter) scale is the four feet, each of which contains a half bridge strain gage load cell. The electronics are sent to recycling. I cut the frame on which the feet are mounted apart and glue the feet to a bottom board, then wire the feet up into two full bridges in parallel. I've tested one so far, using an Analog Devices 2B31J conditioner/amplifier, and it works pretty well, with a slight temperature drift that should be correctable. The output is a little "steppy", I think because as temperature increases and decreases, the bottom board expands and contracts, causing a little lateral dragging of the feet. The steps are around 1/4 pound. I'll probably put friction-reducing pads under the feet at some point, but they're good enough even with the steps.

The 2B31J's are relics from the 1980's, and conditioner amplifiers are expensive (usually around $150 used on e-bay), so this project will depend on an affordable option.


----------



## LizardKing (Feb 12, 2014)

Oh, I love to see hive monitoring projects!
Please post mor einfo and pics when you get it running.
Thought of doing one but the costs of a decent scale has left me waiting....


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

DMLinton,

Toughbooks! I remember those. We bought one for a military project and it failed in a week. Meanwhile, I had a cheap Toshiba Satellite laptop that we used outdoors in the mud ... picked it up in 2002 and it was still going strong in 2012 when I retired. I have an old Toshiba that I use as my backwoods computer, which likely will be the comm/display system for the Arduinos.

What I like about the Arduino approach, apart from the price, is their versatility. My pro datalogger is just a dumb analog datalogger, so dumb that it has no setting to log at less than 1 Hz. I can rig the Arduinos to log both digital/serial shields and analog inputs at any rate I like, toss in a couple of microphones and log FFT results, and integrate my sensors with things like weather stations.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

enjambres said:


> @Phoebee:
> 
> Are you on the BEE-L list serve group? This morning there was an announcement and call for papers for a specialty conference to be added on to the Western Apicultural Society's meeting on Sept 18-19 ...
> 
> ...


Thanks! We just heard about the Eastern Apicultural Society annual meeting at last night's bee class, but with no detail about what they do. Probably I need a year tinkering before I have anything presentable, but that's the sort of science project stuff I like. Our local bee association engages in publishable research, and did a paper a couple of years back on the benefits of locally-produced nucs, funded as a SARE grant (around a $2500 grant). Since they already know the ropes, I'd figured I'd sniff around there and see if there are projects I could tackle under a modest grant. Our hives will be in West Virginia, and I hear the competition for SARE grants there is not as bad as Virginia.

http://www.sare.org/Grants

Example of a bee grant:

Evaluating Hornfaced Bees (Osmia cornifrons
Radoszkowski) as Pollinators of Highbush Blueberry
$9,933.00 Todd West West Virginia
University


----------



## ThisGuy (Jan 13, 2014)

The fact that the load cells will be outdoors and be under constant load could lead to degredation/hysteresis. Just a thought.. but might not be an issue depending on the cells used.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Hence my wanting a season of use on them. The mechanical load elements are steel, which is not prone to creep if loaded conservatively and kept at ordinary temperatures, but it will rust. I may need to use some rust-proofing paint on them. The plastic mounts might creep, or deteriorate in outside conditions. The stability of strain gage adhesive is unknown. I doubt they used cyanoacrylate, but if they did it may debond after weather exposure.

The original scale was rated at 330 pounds. The individual cells need to be able to handle off-center load, so likely each one can take 330 pounds without a permanent set. With a well-balanced load, I could probably apply 500 pounds easily with no damage. I think normal hive weights are well within the capacity of these load cell feet.

My first test showed erratic behavior, but that turned out to be a bad amplifier. I saw no hysteresis once I changed to a good channel. But the "steppiness" is essentially a small scale hysteresis that looks like a stick-slip problem. So the 18-bit converters (about one part in a quarter million, or a few hundredths of an ounce) are gross overkill for the quality of the load cells. But my hope is not to weigh individual bees. I'd like to see a drop when the foragers leave in the morning, though.

If I were made of money, I'd use four shiny Lebow stainless steel hermetically sealed load cells per hive. But nobody would buy them unless they had a federal grant. Let's see if we can get away with cheap, and work from there. Other people have tried mechanical bathroom scales and gotten away with it.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Progress update:

My buddy MSimon is eager for electronic design projects and is working with me to come up with something affordable. This would be open-source, like Arduino projects, but he'd probably sell boards. His design group would like to sell their own computer but the approach and price would be similar to Arduino, and all the pieces would work with Arduino.

I've ordered a Seeeduino Mega and some sensor and shield cards. I just found one outfit that sells differential amplifier cards and 12-bit ADC cards, and ordered a pair of each (all the way from China, found none in the US). Simon and I will probably wind up making a single card that has the diff amp, excitation supply, and a 16-bit converter (resolution of .08 oz at 330 lbs full scale!), plus taps for temperature, humidity, and other sensors as desired. One of these cards per hive, user adds sensors as required, including a gutted cheap bathroom scale. I am planning to add a microphone amplifier. Plug in a $5 microphone and the right software, and the setup could give more data on each hive than most research hives get, and customizable.

Hive weight
Hive temperature
Hive humidity
Apidiction (FFT to determine 240 Hz buzz peak of a healthy hive)
Room for more sensors (motion detection, etc).

Then one Arduino-type computer (mine cost $44) could service a cluster of hives, each set up as described above. A few additional sensors could record outside temperature, humidity, sunshine, soil moisture, or even a full weather station (all these things have been done by Arduino enthusiasts). A temperature/humidity sensor is about $8, and I'd expect about that for a sunshine sensor.

I'm thinking a setup for 4 hives might cost $350-400. A bit more for solar power and maybe a long-distance RF link for remote hives. So the question is, for how many people would $100 per hive be worth it? A hive produces maybe $500 in honey in a good year, retail? Labor costs are high, and my guess would be the justification is in knowing WHEN an outyard needs attention.

For me, I just can't resist the urge to rig up stuff like this, just to see it go. Which, I think, drives the Arduino market.


----------



## McBee7 (Dec 25, 2013)

Great work Phoebee..

One additional sensor I was considering was surface temperature inside the box, mounted
near the top, where respatory gasses could condense, if the surface temp fell
bellow the internal dew point....internal surface temp, would be different than the internal air temp,
It would probably need to be insulated on the inside, so it didn't average air temp, and surface
temp ...just a thought..

==McBee7==


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Arduino also makes a moisture sensor for gardening and a rain sensor. The rain sensor detects droplets on a grid, so it might be the way to detect condensing moisture.

What I've proposed to Simon is that we have jacks on the scale card for as many additional sensors as people think they might need on a particular hive. I figured not less than 6, so you could just pick the Arduino sensors you need and plug them in to the scale card. The only catch is the sensors have to have addresses so they can share the same data line. I think that's all worked out in the I2C scheme they use.

If this will work, you'd run one 4-wire cable to each hive (power, ground, serial data, and the microphone analog line). Minimum fuss between hive and computer.

There are temperature sensors out there that use I2C, and each one comes with a unique 64-bit code, but I don't know if Arduino uses those.


----------



## DMLinton (Sep 23, 2013)

Phoebee said:


> Progress update:
> I'm thinking a setup for 4 hives might cost $350-400. A bit more for solar power and maybe a long-distance RF link for remote hives. So the question is, for how many people would $100 per hive be worth it? A hive produces maybe $500 in honey in a good year, retail? Labor costs are high, and my guess would be the justification is in knowing WHEN an outyard needs attention.


I think $100/hive would be at the upper justifiable limit. My rough calcs indicate that $50/hive is almost certainly justifiable. A double deep colony sells for around $350 here later in the Summer. Spring nucs with imported queens are $150/nuc or with local Spring queens, about $200/nuc. Assuming the electronics last five years (wild assed guess), at $100/hive initial cost the annual cost would be around $20-$25/hive. With those numbers, one need only save 1 out of 14 colonies due to info from the monitoring system to make it an approximately break even undertaking. 

On the communications, my preference would be WiFi for my home yard and mobile Internet for outyards (unless I am close to enough to someone's house to rent some Internet bandwidth over WiFi) as some of them could be up to 45 miles away.

BTW, the DS18B20 one wire temperature sensors have unique addresses.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

At the moment I'm looking at 8-channel multiplexers added to the scale amplifier card to enable seven additional sensors off the card. Most of them seem to use a 3-bit address (3 more wires from the controller). It would work.

For my more grandiose plans of peppering a hive or other instrumentation needs with temperature sensors, those compact little DS18B20's would be the hot ticket ... as I understand it no multiplexing would be needed. A list of addresses would be, and it might take some software tweaking to operate them, as Arduino usually uses 7 or 8-bit I2C addresses. (Just checked, yup, I'd downloaded the datasheet already.)

For a job like that I might fall back on the UEIDAQ thermocouple datalogger, which has the additional advantage of being able to measure to 1320C.


----------



## LizardKing (Feb 12, 2014)

I saw one hive monitor that used a webcam and PC software to count the number
of bees in and out of the hive.
I would like to see this idea expanded to count the number of mites seen on the bees going in and out.
Would that not be useful to tell the mite load of a hive? 
Sure, you wouldn't see ALL of the mites on EVERY bee but I bet it could eventually tell
you the overall hive mite load.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

LizardKing said:


> I saw one hive monitor that used a webcam and PC software to count the number
> of bees in and out of the hive.
> I would like to see this idea expanded to count the number of mites seen on the bees going in and out.
> Would that not be useful to tell the mite load of a hive?
> ...


That was one of my early thoughts, but it turns out the mites mostly hide in the segments of the abdomen and don't show up well. They're also more on drones, which don't come and go as often as workers. Most photos you see of them show a mite on the bee's back on the thorax, but it turns out that's very rare. If they would do that an image recognition program could probably spot them. Might be a tall task for an Arduino, though.


----------



## Roland (Dec 14, 2008)

Thank you for the updates. Keep us posted. 

I will try to pursue the 4-20ma route before we see green grass.

Crazy Roland


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

I took a quick look at 4-20 mA, and there are chips to do it, but I didn't get far with it. The ones I looked at were kinda large and pricy but I don't see why they have to be. Most likely I'd do the same front end as the Arduino system, but just have boards made that use the 4-20. These little boards are pretty cheap and easy to have fabricated. The strain gage amplifier chip is a INA125 ... the datasheet shows the strain gage application. Just go from there to the current output device.

The I2C system is probably superseding it because it transmits the data serially, which also deals well with distance. A lot of systems can now read it, and I'm starting to warm up to it. But 4-20 is still available.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Warning, if you are not an electrical engineer, your eyes will probably glaze over at the technical discussion that follows.

Starting with a sound track from a hive pilfered from YouTube, I played the track thru a Harmon Kardon HK 725 preamp, using every button available to cut highs and boost lows. I re-recorded the resulting signal in mono on a Sony pocket recorder at its lowest sample rate. This simulates a sample rate we might get on an Arduino computer recording bursts of sound, using adequate low pass filtering to achieve a valid Nyquist criterion while still capturing bee buzz. 

I used GNU Octave (been needing to try it out) to process the signal. Octave is similar to MatLab except for two major differences. First, MatLab costs $3000 for a basic single-user license. GNU-Octave is free, although modest donations are encouraged. Second, Octave lacks a lot of bells and whistles that MatLab has. However, both are equipped with FFT toolboxes, and can take a .wav file and tell what frequencies are present and at what amplitudes.

Attached are a single pass of a 1024-sample stretch of sound, at a 11,025 Hz sample frequency, and 16-bits, plus two frequency plots which sum 16 and 32 such passes. Supposedly all this could be done by an Arduino computer, although maybe at a slightly slower sample rate (which would show low frequencies even better).

The two main peaks are at around 120 Hz and 240 Hz. Supposedly the 240 Hz peak is young nurse bees. If this peak goes away, you need to inspect the hive (probably should have a couple of weeks earlier) to find out why you don't have young bees. Possibly because the queen stopped laying a while back. 

I am hoping to make this a standard feature of the hive monitoring system. I don't know how many of you will care, but the cost to add it is a couple of chips and a $5 microphone, and it would be optional. The peaks would probably be represented by two numbers, with the 240 Hz number expected to be higher than the 120 Hz number, so you would not need to be an EE to read this, just know what the numbers normally are and know to inspect the hive if they look different than normal. I would expect this to normally shift during the year, especially when the winter bees take over. You could watch the young nurses come on-line in the spring.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Searching on apidiction doesn't turn up much. Searching here on Apidictor is more fruitful. Here's what is archived on BS. I don't know how solid the underlying research is, but clearly the signals are present and will say something about hive health. If my version works it could run automated and probably add something like $10 a hive to the cost of the hive monitor. The boards would all be the same, and mostly it would be if chips were soldered in and a microphone plugged in.

http://www.beesource.com/build-it-yourself/apidictor/


----------



## Zebra (Aug 15, 2012)

Hi Phoebee, I've been watching your post with interest. There was a Kickstarter project a few months back that you might be interested in. If nothing else, it might give you some ideas for your own project. Best wishes in your endeavor.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Cool, I'll have to take a closer look at that project. Ultimately I expect to add a weather station and solar performance station.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

One of our bee association senior members just sent a link to something related. It is a morass, and open source is not the most profitable business model:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open-source-beehives#home

Scanning over it, this is a disorganized mess of ideas, but at least some measure of the level of interest. One link may be more on target:

http://colonymonitoring.com/cmwp/

The hive weight scheme shown in the link above shows a variation on the usual bathroom scale scheme: One must manually operate a device that lifts and lowers the hive onto an essentially unmodified mechanical or electronic bathroom scale, thus requiring a visit and notepad datalogging.

And this leads to a NASA website. It does give a Scale Hive Protocol.

http://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/About.htm


----------



## knute (Mar 10, 2013)

In case you haven't seen it, Hivetool.net is pretty cool. One of our local guild members (Redwood City, CA) has two of his hives streaming data to this, and I'd love to get mine hooked up. He was actually able to identify real time when a swarm issued, and rushed home to capture it from a tree in his yard. If this implementation could be adapted to something like an Arduino (I think there is a Raspberry Pi implementation) it would be less infrastructure and less power requirements than using an old laptop.


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

Yup, that's the idea.

Tho' I confess to just wanting to have fun tinkering, too.

My friend Simon has some boards in the works. I never had much luck with the Seeeduino Mega. I probably could get it to run but these things evidently ship with a buggy USB interface and I've not had time to get it talking. The differential amplifiers I ordered from Grove turned out to have had their design changed around the day I ordered ... not what I wanted, didn't work as advertised, improperly documented, and I was not prepared to reverse engineer them to correct the problem. The Chinese designer thinks they may get a round tuit one day.

Simon thinks he can build better for not a lot more. I eagerly await the first box of toys.


----------



## Variable (Nov 18, 2013)

I just got my 2 hives setup. My first(s)!!! I built an Arduino Hive controller. It monitors (and can maintain with heat and fan) environmental variables of the hives. Unfortunately I did not get it from the bread board and into the hives as quickly as I had hoped. I was hoping to have it done and in the hive BEFORE the packages arrived... all well I was too slow and the bees arrived Monday.
All the sensors, heater, fan and LCD screen (with all needed wiring) are in place but the Arduino, the shield I am putting the electronics on and the power supply are still in my house.... 

It consists of:
Arduino Mega 2650 (could not fit the program on a smaller Arduino) 
Ethernet shield with SD card
2 ds18b20 temp sensors (one for outside box temp or solar gain and one for the bottom board temp where the heater is)
2 DHS22 (digital humidity and temp sensors on for outdoor and one for inside)
Real Time clock
Barometer
Photo-resistor (light sensor for rough idea of lighting conditions)

It logs all the temp, humidity, light, and any controls conditions (fan or heater) to the SD card every minute (changable) and logs the time/date info. It also sends that data to my webserver (any computer would work but I went "cloud" lol) so I can graph that data and have it more convenient than out in the yard on an SD card....
It has a few internal webpages (some I am still working on) that show the status and condition of the hive (done). A page for network settings or DHCP(done). A page for setting temp controls such as when the fan turns on and heater(in progress). Finally a page to change the other settings such as email warnings (when too hot or cold or SD card write fails or whatever...) log interval, email addresses and servers, (working on this)
It emails me when it starts and many of the conditions of the hive and controller.
It displays on the 40X2 LCD the hive temp/humidity, outdoor temp/humidity, the air pressure and the date and time. It will tell you when it writes to the sd card or is updating the server or sending an email as well as some other error info in required. I built an RGB LED back-light into the LCD and it changes color based on outdoor temps.... if it is too cold to open the hive it is blue and it turns yellow when it is "ok but get out quick" and green when it is "ok"
It has a cover switch so if the box is opened it logs the data immediately (does not matter if you had logging set to every 100 hours it will log right now) and sends an email. One could add text messaging to this output if they wanted as well... warnings can be a good thing.... 

Everything is changeable in the well noted Arduino sketch. As soon as I finish up the perfboard (what a bad idea!! I should have just had one made from a good schematic...) I will work on the code again to finish up the webpages to change the settings. That way you do not have to reload the Arduino just to change how often it logs, or where the emails go, or at what temp (if any) the fan or heaters turn on). I also need to add the ability to change it from Celsius to Fahrenheit (it is in Fahrenheit) 

Pretty much everything works and I will put it in with the code that is on it. I have just been adding additional webpages to configure the settings and storing them to the eeprom instead of those variables being in the compiled program..... time.. time... just never have enough it seems....

I would love to add a scale, a mic and a web camera (camera would be separate from Arduino and would require me to put a laser on it to destroy incoming moths and beetles hahaha ) as well as a 3 axis tilt sensor (BEARS/wind) and a "gauge" for my feeder. I have an "out of feed" idea but would like a more accurate level to be displayed... maybe with a flex resistor and a float.... )
.
Happy to share code if people are interested. I have a schematic drawn onto the inside cover of a cardboard box that would be helpful as well (if you can read it....)
I have a bunch of little projects to finish up and will be posting all my build info... including the insulated hives I built... But this is not the thread for that.
I log into beesource about once a week so don't get mad if I do not get back to you quickly. Just send me a message and I will get back to you eventually.


----------



## codeboy823 (Aug 14, 2012)

Glad to hear people are wrestling with the same things I am! I wanted to measure temp, humidity and hive weight but decided I needed to start simple so I stuck with just temp and humidity for now. I'm using an Arduino Uno, three DHT-22 temp/humidity sensors (one on the outside of the hive for ambient, one in the brood box and one near the Arduino at the top of the hive), an SD card shield to log the data, and a 6 AA battery pack for power. I built a ventilation type board to house the electronics. I put plastic mesh on the bottom and on the vent holes that the bees hopefully won't chew through. I'm still unsure of where to dangle the sensor for the brood box. I guess between two drawn frames in the middle of the box would be the best. Hopefully they won't build a bunch of bridge comb around it. Otherwise I guess I'd put it between the first or last frame and the hive body. I'd love to be able to set up solar power but that would be a future project. I have some "sleep" code in between polls of the sensors, so hopefully the batteries will last more than a few weeks.

Here are some photos


----------



## Phoebee (Jan 29, 2014)

I got sidetracked for a while. The Seeeduino Mega is still in a box, never could get it to load code, probably due to a USB driver issue. The Grove strain amplifier turned out to be a waste of time. They changed the design, and apparently populated it with the wrong gain resistors so it has almost no sensitivity.

My buddy MSimon got a little carried away with the hive scale project, and instead of just building a shield or stain amplifier, he threw in a processor. Alas, he's a Forth enthusiast, and hates C, so this will be a different learning experience for most Arduino users. It shouldn't be hard to learn, but I need to get handle on it. The board is fabricated and has two A-D channels, 24-bit if my memory serves correctly. He provided me with a USB board to communicate with it. I've yet to plug it in, but did get out the schematic and found out I need a 3.3V supply for it. Parts for that shipped today.


----------

