Sound frequency detection in a beehive

End Devices (Nodes) Hardware
1

Hi all,

My LoRa beehive is finally taking shape, one area I’m having issues with is sound. Due to transmitting sensor data once an hour (Power and LoRa bandwidth considerations) I can’t transmit actual audio for further analysis.

The ESP32 currently wakes up (hourly) to gather sensor data, I was thinking to use something like this FFT Library\example to generate 8 or more “frequency buckets” across the spectrum and transmitting the values in addition to overall volume each hour, what do you think? Has anyone else done something similar?

I noticed @abaretta posted on the old beehive thread about his commercial product that has a device that’s collecting sound data, I wonder if he is doing something similar? His device is coin cell powered so I assume so. I’m not really sure how he’s working out swarming, queenless etc but I plan to just collect data and then cross reference my observations against the data and see if there’s any patterns.

I have an INMP441 sensor currently within the hive, it’s connected via CAT5 cable directly to the ESP32.

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Hello chinswain,

a while ago, I was involved in the early stage of a project where we wanted to classify and count flying insects by their wingbeats. This was done on the sensor device. Only aggregates were transmitted via TTN to a backend.
Depending on use (lab or outside) and power budget, interesting samples could be stored for later retrieval or transmission by other means. More can be found here:

So my guess is, you are on the right track. I would try to collect sound samples of the different moods a hive can be in and store them on a micro SD card. You can train a model to detect those states in your hive and send alerts and stats via ttn.
I hope this helps.

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