The assignment for this week is to position the project, in this case the Beesbot, in the field and discribe how the system should work. It should discribe the future of the project. I want to make the Beesbot an open source project. This means I will share all files that were made during this Fabacademy period. Because the Fabacademy is for a big part depending on open source information and materials, I think it is a good idea to share my project in return as a contribution to the system. I will develop the Beesbot further and there are many ideas within this concept to work on. To start testing with real bees I intent to take a bee-keeper course next season.
The final project assignment is a combination of robotics with a traditional way of bee-farming. Keeping bees is quite an engineered way of working. The bee-keeper has to follow certain steps in order to keep the bee population in shape. This project initially tries to store the engineered knowledge from bee-keepers into the robot so it can conserve the knowledge and make it beneficial in remote area's where bees used to fly in the past. Almost all motions in the hive are driven by stepper motors in combination with Arduino Software. This also makes the interface with Processing good possible. Almost all components are completely fab-able (doable in a FabLab). Combining a machine in nature is the goal here.
What I would like to make clear, and protect when possible, is the idea around the basic design of the Beesbot into a network of many hives. This can be described as follows:
A Beesbot network is:
I would like to invite makers, designers and beeskeepers to cooperate in this project to develop it further. You can contact me on p.groneveld@saxion.nl.
Because of this the project needs to be available to the community for further development or hacking I choose the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (short CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0) because it fits my ideology in both software and hardware terms. You can freely remix, adapt, hack/modify the machine but I don’t want it to become a commercial product in the first place. When using codes or anything, just use attribution just as I do so people will get the overview much faster. Working on this project also means that future derivations will be shared under the same conditions.
As mentioned above I will try to push this project for further academic or artistic purposes. For this moment the complete system is not ready yet. If the Beesbot is complete and working, it can be sold to an individual orn an organization interested in this topic. For this moment I see this project as a "personal business card", combining design, making, digital fabrication and biology.
If I have the chance to do the Fabacademy again I will do it for sure. For me it was a great opportunity to become more familiar with electronics (hardware and software). On the other hand the making assignments were also very interesting for gaining more experience in the different techniques. Still there is a lot more to learn. Most of it is mentioned in the lectures and needs more elaboration. I highly recommend this programme to anybody interested in making, shaping and fabricating the future or at least parts of it.
The program has a very well thought through sequence of making and improving week by week. I hope to build on to this sequence the coming years for my self and with other people from my University.
Any content on these pages by Paul Gröneveld
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License