Introduction To the Project

Who am I?

My name is Darren, I currently live in the UK and I work with in the interesting field of Big Data Analytics and predominantly work with a software product called Splunk.  In my spare time, among other things i also keep bees and currently have 10 beehives dotted around the area i live, mostly in friends and my own back gardens.
I got into beekeeping a few years ago, when i wanted to learn about the decline of bees and the effect that would have on society as we know it.  Rather than reading a book, i decided to learn by doing and got my first hive.

The Project

What I intend to do and Why?

The goal of this project was to marry my career and my hobby in an interesting way, i also wanted to learn about the health and strength of my colonies when i am not near the hives.  Also it is an interesting challenge for personal learning and development for my career, to make me better at what i do.
I am also going to attempt to write this blog to track my progress, let anyone that is interested know what i have done, so if they want they can repeat and improve on what i have done.  I am also going to attempt to make this blog understandable and hopefully interesting to both my beekeeping friends and people that work within my industry, at the end of the day we can all hopefully learn something new

Project Goals

The main "use case" that gave me the idea to start this project was that i wanted to know how healthy my colonies are without having to disturb them all the time, the questions I hope to answer as part of this project are:

• Are my bees healthy?
• Is my colony strong/growing?
• Are my bees starving or struggling to find a food source?
• Have my bees swarmed?
• Is there any honey for me to harvest?

I am sure that i will learn other things while i work on this project, but for these are my key indicators for success.
Once I am collecting data, all output from this project should be understandable by as many people as possible.

Personal Learning Goals

One of the reasons for thinking about a project like this was career development, i find it easier to learn when i have a real objective, rather than just reading books and knowledge articles.  One of the things i have been trying to improve is a programming language called python and i intend to use that to take readings from the sensors and feed that information to Splunk for analysis.  I am also going to be using a few other work related tools for the technical bit, which are an operating system called Linux and a configuration management tool called Puppet.  The hardware that i intend to use is a small computer that is being used in schools a lot now to teach programming called a Raspberry Pi.