XIV Международная научно-техническая конференция АПЭП – 2018

Development of a Sound Recognition System Using

STM32 Microcontrollers for Monitoring the State of
Biological Objects
Vali Kh. Abdrakhmanov1, Renat B. Salikhov 2, Konstantin V. Vazhdaev1,2
Physical-Technical Institute, Bashkir State University, Ufa, Russia1
Architectural and Construction Institute of Ufa State Petroleum Technological University, Ufa, Russia2

Abstract – The analysis of the main trends in the development of
automation in the field of beekeeping, in particular the use of
modern network technologies, sound recognition technologies
for monitoring the state of bee-families. Considered the main
existing recognition technologies, requirements for the hard-
ware of monitoring systems. The possibility of implementing a
prototype based on the Arduino platform with Wi-Fi modules
ESP8266, advantages and disadvantages of this solution was
considered. As a result, the conclusion of the feasibility of using
the 32-bit STM32 microcontroller with a core ARM Cortex-M4,
and for developing a prototype device - the
STM32F4DISCOVERY evaluation board. The features of de-
velopment of projects on STM32, a choice of software for devel-
opment are also considered.
Index Terms – monitoring the state of bee families, algorithms
for artificial neural networks (neuronet), algorithms for fast
Fourier transform (FFT), speech recognition technology, Ar-
duino Due, IoT, ARM Cortex-M4, STM32F4DISCOVERY,
STM32Cube, CooCox IDE.
I. INTRODUCTION
Automation in beekeeping would help solve several prob-
lems. Let's consider the main relatively easily solved prob-
lems. Diagnosis of the state of beekeeping by sounds pro-
duced by a bee hive. In the summer period, you can deter-
mine the different stages in the life of the hive: calm state,
ventilation, singing of the uterus, swarm output, flying bees,
etc. Especially important is the ability to recognize the sing-
ing of the uterus; during the swarming period, the probability
of bee-losses and beekeepers during this period are forced to
constantly monitor the apiary, not having the opportunity to
go off for a while somewhere. In addition, many experienced
beekeepers carry out various measures to eliminate swarming
(make so-called layers, etc.), which can be quite labor-
intensive. During the wintering period, it is also possible to
determine the condition of the bee-family by sounds, for ex-
ample, to determine the situation of lack of food, disease of
bees, violation of the temperature regime in the winter hut,
increased humidity, etc., which require intervention by the
bee-fisherman. To monitor the condition of the bee family, in
addition to the sound signals of the hive, it is also advisable
to remove the temperature in the hive, because The increased
temperature during the wintering of the whitefish reveals the
disturbance of the bees. Also, the humidity in the hive is im-
portant - a change in humidity can also be an alarm.
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II. PROBLEM DEFINITION
Judging by the publications in the network, it can be noted
that automation in the field of beekeeping in European coun-
tries is widely introduced. This is due to the fact that bee-
keeping develops mainly not only for the products of bee-
keeping, but because of the need for pollination of agricul-
tural plants, in addition bees play an important role in main-
taining the stability of the entire biosphere. There are known
foreign developments in monitoring systems of bee colonies:
for example, Apis - the development of Portuguese beekeep-
ers [1], which allows you to monitor the status of hives re-
motely, directly from your smartphone. This system can sig-
nificantly facilitate the life of both a beginner beekeeper and
a professional, and the main thing is to significantly reduce
the physical interference in the life of the bees themselves.
The Apis monitoring system aims to make a "smart hive"
from each hive with a built-in temperature and humidity sen-
sor, bee counter and weights. All-important statistical data is
sent to a computer, smartphone, or tablet. In addition, the
European Union is completing the development of a device
for remote monitoring of the health of bees by monitoring
the sounds produced by them in the hive. The initiators of
this project were the University of Trent (UK) and the Asso-
ciation of Farmers of Great Britain (BFA). For the imple-
mentation of the project from the EU budget allocated 1.4
million euros [2].
There are also domestic developments [3], where it is pro-
posed alongside monitoring, to realize also the regulation of
temperature and humidity in the hive (by installing an elec-
tric heater in the hole of the lower tap) during wintering, and
also in the spring-summer period prior to the beginning of
June Moment, when stable warm weather is established in
the central part of Russia) - at this time there is a sharp tem-
perature drop, which requires large energy costs from the bee
colony. The main element of the monitoring and diagnostics
device is the Atmel microcontroller. It is connected to digital
temperature sensors DS1620, humidity HIH4000 and electret
microphone SG72.
To diagnose the condition of bee families by sounds, you
can use known and widely used speech recognition technolo-
gies, with two fundamentally different recognition methods:
T2SI (text-to-speaker-independent, "person-independent",
anyone can be speaking) and SD (speaker -dependent, the
one who taught the system should speak). Obviously, in our
device, the more easy to implement SD method will be more

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2018 14th International Scientific-Technical Conference APEIE – 44894
appropriate. The possibility of using a free voice recognition
service from Google servers such as Google ASR or Yan-
dexSpeechKit [4] was considered, but this requires a constant
network connection, that for a battery device with Wi-Fi
modules ESP8266 [5], known for their high power consump-
tion, is unacceptable.
In addition, it must be said that these programs use a more
complex "human-independent" T2SI method, whereas in our
case, SD (speaker-dependent) is sufficient. Thus, it is clear
that Google ASR or YandexSpeechKit speech recognition
services can not be adapted to recognize the sounds of bees,
and it would be necessary to develop their own service with
their server. It is possible to refuse the transfer of all data to
the server. The operating system for mobile devices Android
4.1 allows this, because there is a system of offline - speech
recognition; Internet access is not required. Moreover, the
quality of recognition is reduced. But in our case, using An-
droid - the device will be redundant and expensive, in this
case it is desirable to avoid redundancy, because first of all.
you need to minimize power consumption.
EasyVR Shield 3.0 speech recognition software [6] (shown
in Fig. 1) was also considered, but this is too expensive a
solution for beekeeping (price 50 Euro).
Fig. 1. EasyVR Shield 3.0
III. PROPOSED IDEAS FOR DEVELOPMENT
After analyzing the state of the problem, it is possible to
propose a fairly budgetary solution using the Arduino plat-
form, with the Wi-Fi module ESP8266 [5], the microphone
module [7], the Micro SD card [8] needed to store the sam-
ples (shown in Fig. 2), the DS18B20 digital temperature sen-
sor. The sampling frequency for the audio signal is usually
taken at 48 kHz, but for the sounds of the hive it is sufficient
to take the frequency band of 70..600Hz [9], and then it is
obvious that the requirements for the microphone module
bandwidth are low - for the electret condenser microphone
CZN used in the microphone module [7] 20Hz..14kHz. Also,
the sampling frequency of the signal can be reduced, which
will reduce the memory and speed requirements of the con-
troller in comparison with the known task of speech recogni-
tion, for example.
Fig. 2. Wi-Fi module ESP8266-07, microphone module, SPI - reader mod-
ule for micro SD card.
Thus, we propose to implement monitoring on the sounds
of the bee-family and the temperature in the hive. We believe
that the implementation of the regulation of temperature and
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humidity in the spring-summer period will be too time-
consuming (it is necessary to tie the wires across the whole
apiary) for widespread introduction, but the ability to deter-
mine the state of swarming (the so-called singing of the uter-
us) will be called for by beekeepers - After the swarm period,
the modules can be disabled and completely removed from
the apiary. We also consider excessive and laborious control
of the weight of the hive.
For recognition, it is proposed to use algorithms of artifi-
cial neural networks (ANN) [10], with a preliminary expan-
sion of the frequency spectrum, for which use the algorithms
for Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) - there are libraries of 8-bit
conversion [11]. Thus, we propose to implement monitoring
on the sounds of the bee-family and the temperature in the
hive.
It is proposed to periodically extract small samples of the
signal from the microphone module, digitize it using an Ar-
duino board, and only if a change in the state of the bee-
family is detected (for example, the singing of the uterus has
been fixed) to include a Wi-Fi module. This will minimize
the power consumption of the device, which is especially
important due to the use of autonomous power. In view of
the fact that large volumes of RAM are required for selec-
tion, high processing speed is suggested to be used by Ar-
duino Due [12] based on the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 86MHz
ARM, 512K flash + 96K RAM. Clones Arduino Due from
Chinese manufacturers can cost relatively under-the-go -
from 15USD. The use of the Arduino platform is usually due
to the low cost and a large number of ready-made modules
with libraries for their connection. In addition, you can easily
find a lot of information on devices already implemented on
this base. The lack of hardware support for digital processing
of signals, support of operations for floating-point numbers,
the need for large computing power with low power con-
sumption leads to the decision about the advisability of using
32-bit microcontrollers with the ARM Cortex-M4 core.
The emergence and wide distribution of sufficiently budget
32-bit microcontrollers STM32 with the ARM Cortex-M4
core, which differs by the built-in instructions for Digital
Signal Processing (DSP) and Floating Point Unit (FPU) ,
allows them to be used for our development. And, despite the
high power and speed due to the peculiarities of the timing
system in ARM microcontrollers, it is possible to significant-
ly reduce power consumption. Particularly convenient for
developing a prototype device is the STM32F4DISCOVERY
board [13] (shown in Fig. 2), based on the
STM32F407VGT6 microcontroller [14] (Cortex M4,
168MHz, flash 1MB, RAM 192Kb). Of course, the presence
of DSP and FPU is especially valuable, which will speed up
the processing of sound, but also significantly higher clock
frequency, a large amount of RAM, as well as the presence
of a board-based digital microphone (ST MEMS sensor
MP45DT02).
In addition, there is an audio DAC with an amplifier of
class D, which you can try to use to reproduce pre-recorded
in memory samples of the uterus sounds in a calm state in
order to calm, while digging, for example. Thus, it becomes
possible to investigate the influence on the behavior of bees
with the help of standard uterus sounds, which could possi-
 XIV Международная научно-техническая конференция АПЭП – 2018

bly stop the swarming or slow it down. It is also possible to REFERENCES

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2018 14th International Scientific-Technical Conference APEIE – 44894

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Vali Kh. Abdrakhmanov in 1998 he was graduated

from Ufa State Aviation Technical University
(UGATU). In 2003 defended his Ph.D. thesis in the
USATU, then worked as an assistant professor at
the Department of Industrial Electronics at the
Faculty of Aviation Instrumentation of the USATU.
Now he works as an assistant professor of the
Department of Info communication Technologies
and Nanoelectronics at the Physics -Technical
Institute of the Bashkir State University, Ufa. His
field of scientific interests is automation and
control systems.

Renat B. Salikhov graduated in 1981 National

Research Nuclear University NNRU. In 1987, he
defended his Ph.D. thesis in the field of solid-state
physics. He was the head of the laboratory of fiber-
optic transducers OKB "Charger" in the 1990s,
assistant professor of general physics at the Bashkir
State Pedagogical University in the 2000s. At
present, he is the head of the department of info
communication technologies and Nanoelectronics
of the Physical and Technical Institute of the
Bashkir State University. Area of interest in re-
search and development - condensed matter phys-
ics, nanotechnology and electronics.

Konstantin V. Vazhdaev was graduated from Ufa

State Aviation Technical University (USATU) in
1998. In 2003 defended his Ph.D. thesis in the
USATU. Then he worked as an assistant professor
at the Department of Information and Measurement
Technology of the Faculty of Aviation Instrumenta-
tion UGATU. Currently, he works as an assistant
professor of the Department of Infocommunication
Technologies and Nanoelectronics at the Physico-
Technical Institute of the Bashkir State University,
city of Ufa. His field of scientific interests is
information and measurement technology.

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