Two Bee's or No Two Bee's what is the temperature?

Dad can you help with my science project?

Have you ever have a evening that started like that? Discussions of dependent and independent variables and how to construct experiments in the real world where you have little control over the environment.

Well cutting to the chase, we ended up building a camera that also logs temperatures. The camera is activated at the same time each day relative to sunrise. It takes a heap if pictures and temperatures then shuts down and waits for the next day. One temperature to be taken from air and the other from within the hive.

Why not just use an IP camera? Well it did start off that way but the camera I had was a old 'crock' that only worked on windows XP. It had no stream feed and we still needed to log temperature. So we gutted the camera and used the housing for a ESP32-CAM which was also tasked with driving the DS-1820 temperature sensors. All data was nicely stored on a micro SD card. This also allowed us to retrieve the image and data files from the card via wireless and web interface. No need to annoy the bee's!

Issues

Wanting to use an external antenna meant some microsurgury was required on the circuit board. The very wee zero ohm resistor needed to be moved. Even with a five times magnifier and the smallest tip my solder station came with, this was challenging. Man, I reckon the fellas who build these modules must have the smallest fingers!

Lack of pins to drive the temperature probes was an issue at first but we decided to use the RX pin of the main UART. This allowed us to still use the TX pin for debugging.

This meant there was only 5 connections to the board in the final build. Two for 5V DC power and three for the two temperature probes. The unit is powered from a 12V battery via a switch mode power supply. It draws about 100 ma at 12V which is replenished from a plugpack charger. I Hid the pull-up resistor for the DS-1820 in the wiring loom.

I think the bee's must have got wind of our plan to put one of the probes in there hive. The bit or wire mesh that in years gone by was supposed to keep the bees out of the wall. It seems to have now been "welded" into their hive.

Time not on our side

This was to be an opportunity for me to pick up some much needed skilled in HTML/CSS but the flirtation with elegance turned into an unholy shotgun marriage with a bunch of other code to get the job done in time. So if your precious about code style or form don't look and click away now, you have been warned. The end result has three parts to the web interfaces. The original (port 80), the stream (port 81) and my bit (port 82).

Things such as automatic reconnect to access point and NTP time adjustments where again lifted from the ESU project as they were known to work.

Improvements

Maybe the camera should have counted the bee's but where would be the science and wonder in that? Temperatures should have been on the photos, yep did try this but it just increased my coffee consumption to unreasonable levels and once again the aim is to increase wonder not automate the world or kill dad with coffee!

Thanks to the cast of thousands

And finally, Once again apologize for the code as it's a rude hack but it does work and maybe I can spark Annie's interest in science.