I am working with a group of high school seniors on a project to instrument beehives using micro:bit and various low cost sensors. The actual connection and coding to read the sensors is pretty straight forward as is the data collection and storage. But what I am interested in are some suggestions for transmitting that data over long distances. Most beehives are located away from population centers. So any monitoring system will of necessity require some form of long range communication to pass data back to the beekeeper for interpretation.
So any suggestions?
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I suppose the radio feature isn’t exactly strong enough here. You would probably need an external connection to the micro:bit that could receive the data through wired connection and send it long distance. You could also collect the data periodically using another micro:bit that sends a signal to the data collecting one to start sending its data over radio. This way I suppose you could get the data in a way that doesn’t disturb the bees but also doesn’t require anything other than having another micro:bit. I don’t know much about bees but this sounds really interesting. Good luck!
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I was looking at this type of thing for something else. Everything I found was hundreds of dollars. For example a wireless USB connection.
I found some evidence that you can write about 30k of data to the micro:bit file system using microPython. You would then have to visit the micro:bits to retrieve the data. But then you would also have to leave the MakeCode world.
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