What is the best place to fix the RUUVI tag in a hive to site and collect all date do you think year round? Crown board immediately over centre or centre wall ?
Also - Using RUUVI tags in hive at distance ; has anyone had good experience of setting up an old phone in a shed connected to a solar panel to charge and forward date from tags to home using a data account on phone for low monthly charge.
Hi @Sarah_Newton ,
Thank you for your message!
For positioning the sensor inside a beehive @henri might have a good idea about this, please wait for his reply.
In general, wireless signals have tendency to get attenuated and even blocked by physical barriers, especially with certain materials. We have written a support article to help you to improve wireless signal reception. If you have a line of sight to your Ruuvi sensor, the Bluetooth signal could in theory be received up to 200 meters in ideal conditions, but with any physical barrier in between this can drop to less than a tenth or even get completely blocked. Your mobile device wireless capabilities can also vary depending of the make and model of your device.
Our Ruuvi Station Android app supports data forwarding to a third party server, but it’s not really designed to be a long term solution and may be quite impractical requiring a spare mobile device to be powered, keeping it within signal range and even possibly paying for the data collection service. Instead, Ruuvi sensors record measurements to internal memory at a lower interval (5 minutes interval, up to 10 days history can be stored), which can then be downloaded to Ruuvi Station app manually by pressing sync button on history view page, which might be a good (with no additional costs included) starting point for you, depending on your beehive size of course.
If you are up for a little DIY, you could also build your own system using Raspberry Pi, there is an interesting discussion regarding this on our forum.
The most trouble-free solution with an improved wireless signal range and a complete remote monitoring system including data storage in cloud and much more can be achieved using our Ruuvi Gateway and a subscription. Internet connection is required for collecting data to cloud service. It’s also possible to use Ruuvi Gateway with your own solution with a bit of tinkering, here are few links for this:
I hope these ideas will get you started!
Thanks for your reply. I’m going to have a go with an old phone. Any idea what amount of data approx 4 sensors might be sending pcm?
Hi Sarah.
I’ve been playing with using RTs to monitor my hives with some success.
I found that it didn’t matter where I put the tags, the bees would find them and propolise them… but the tags kept on working. I tried building hollow dummy boards and hiding the tags there but it didn’t work great - actually the attenuation of the signal was just a bit too much at the distance. In the end, I put the tag directly on top of frames in the brood box and the tags worked fine.
It’s worth thinking about what data you need to collect. Actually, you might not need the exact core temperature over time but just to see the trends up and down around a mean. The shape of the graph might tell you more than the individual data points.
Putting the tag on the crown board would probably give you this trend - but it might also be more affected by external heating or freezing.
I have 3 hives spaced within a 10m line about 100m from a ruuvi gateway. There are some line of sight and blockage issues with trees and contours. Reception is generally OK but it there is a noticeable drop off between the nearest and furthest tags.
I can certainly recommend the gateway if you have a (dry) space and power. I use mine with a power line ethernet extender in a dry box as that avoids having to make compromises between WiFi and Bluetooth ranges.
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