Printed Sensor based Weight Measuring Platform for Remote Real Time Beehive Weight Tracking

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It is crucial to monitor beehive parameters to evaluate the lives of honeybees, ensure the health of beehives and**avoid diseases. Technologies Nectar Inc. is designing and producing sensors-based devices to collect data**relating to the bees colonies health for commercial applications. Their current devices collect beehive**temperature, relative humidity and swarming sound. One of their goal is to measure beehive weight which is an**important parameter. Usually, commercial beekeepers and beehive sensor providers use a weight scale or load**cell to measure the beehive weight. These solutions are expensive and not easy to manipulate because of being**heavy and bulky. In this project, we aim to design and develop an ergonomic weight sensing platform that will**be able measure the beehive weight and wirelessly transmit it to the beekeeper's personal device in real time.**The beehive weight monitoring system will be based on four screen printed capacitive pressure sensors placed**at the four different corners underneath the complete beehive. Each pressure sensor will have a parallel plate**structure where a dielectric layer will be sandwiched between two overlapping conducting electrodes. The**flexible dielectric material will be deformed according to the load applied on the capacitor. Because of**deformation, the distance between the conductor electrodes will vary changing the capacitance between the**them. The pressure sensors will be will be integrated with read out and communication electronics to wirelessly**send the weight measurements to a gateway to further transmit them to the Cloud Nectar. The proposed weight**sensing platform will be lightweight, small in size, user friendly, low cost and easy to setup and will eliminate**the need of beekeepers to measure the hive weight with expensive, heavy and bulky devices.