Native Bee Hive Counters - Circuit Not Working?

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Hi everyone,

I’m having trouble with my electronic native bee hive counters, unfortunately one of the counter circuits is not working. I hope someone may be able to help.

The circuit consists of a solar panel supplying to a 12v battery , photo electric cells, transmitter and remote receiver.

The natives bees access their hive through one small opening, which has an array of photo electric cells. The signal from the photo cells is sent to a transmitter, which transmits a digital signal to a remote receiver/counter.

When you graph the bee count verses time you get an understanding of effects of weather, temperature, time of day has on the activity of the bees.

Because the size of the native bee is small (2mm) compared to honey bee the count is not completely accurate but is more of gauge of activity during the day.

If you have any ideas on how to help, that would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

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Hi Mick
Welcome
Well that is about as vague as you could get. I think that unless somebody happens to have a bee counter on hand or is conversant with how these devices work you could have a problem.

I would suggest that the first line of attack would be to run a multimeter over a known good unit and measure all the pertinent power supply voltages. Then do the same with the faulty unit and compare the two. Any major differences could point to a problem area.
Cheers Bob

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Hi Mick, welcome to the forum!

What a cool project! Bob is on the money there regarding first sanity checking power supply voltages as a first measure, and posting a schematic or photos of your circuit before we can troubleshoot this further.

Keen to get to the bottom of this with you!

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Hi Mick,

working on something similar, just wondering how your idea is coming along.

Cheers, Will