Smart Beehive Monitor
LiveOverview
Smart Beehive Monitor is an ESP32-based IoT system for beekeepers that collects real-time data about hive environment, bee activity, hive weight, location, motion events, and power status, then syncs the data to Firebase for dashboard visualization.
The project covers both the embedded hardware side (ESP32 firmware in C++) and a web dashboard (React/Next.js) for monitoring hive health and activity patterns remotely. The companion dashboard source is maintained separately at smart-beehive-dashboard, while the hardware and firmware source lives in the main monitor repository.
Related write-ups: full-stack ESP32 IoT beehive case study and AI beehive computer vision experiment.
Architecture
Challenges & Solutions
Beehives require outdoor, low-power monitoring that must run continuously without maintenance.
Designed the hardware system around ESP32, solar power, and battery management to enable autonomous field deployment.
Hive health depends on multiple signals - no single sensor tells the full story.
Combined environment, weight, motion, activity, GPS, and power data into a unified Firebase-synced dashboard.
Features
- Temperature, humidity, and air pressure monitoring
- VOC air quality detection
- Infrared bee movement and entry/exit activity tracking
- Continuous hive weight monitoring with 100kg load cell and HX711 amplifier
- Predator detection via motion sensing
- GPS location tracking
- Solar power and battery management for autonomous outdoor deployment
- Firebase Realtime Database sync
- Web dashboard with environment, activity, weight, system status, and location views
