Juanse
"just out of curiosity, How much money are we talking about?"
If your question is a serious one, I can ask my electronic circuit design and my software interface programmer to price out a re-design of our counters for full size hives - it's basically a double-wide unit - double the width and double the number of passageways with emitters and detectors. The detection/countiing software is basically the same, just more channels. We'd probably look into 3D printing to make a mold for the entrance/passage way part, and we'd have to reach out to a metal's fabricator to make double wide aluminum covers.
If you've got to pay for good electronics, it better last, and ours have done so for a decade or more. It defeats the purpose of a counter if it's inaccurate and prone to problems.
Our original counters had a stand-alone data acquisition module, with system checking, and data storage.
This winter we re-worked the interface that we use on trucks and scale hives (hives on pallets) with a variety of sensors from movement and GPS location trackers, temperature monitoring, scale hives, etc.
Thesel have SD cards to store data, as well as being satellite communications ready. We plan this interface device as being the electronic equivalent to spreadsheets, in that each user can set up their own suite of sensors (such as counters and hive weights and theft alarms) or use on trucks moving hives or packages with movement, GLP, load temps, etc., or whatever needs to be monitored such as a bear trap. That would replace the counter interface box and give the end user many more options for use - if it's not on a counter, it might be on a scale hive, or on top of a truck monitoring a delivery, or even monitoring vehicle traffic through a gate or over a road.
We priced our new interface as of 2018 and we will be testing the newly designed unit this spring - bees arrive Friday. The total cost of a revised counter would minimally be the design and fabrication needed to make an 8-10 frame hive version of the 5 frame that we already have. A picture of our 5 frame counter is in our biosensors article http://www.mdpi.com/2079-6374/5/4/678.
I'm not going to work up a complete cost quote unless we've a serious buyer who understands that these won't be $50 or even $500. If accuracy and quality are important, and you've a serious interest in getting a quote, please contact me off-line.
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