I'm mainly working on building a prototype system with all the bells and whistles, but a cheaper Arduino-based GSM unit that texts daily hive weight to a datalogging service would have much more utility for commercial beekeepers.

This system needs approximately 1 kg accuracy over 1 month (allowing some significant fluctuation due to temperature and long-term drift) to allow tracking of nectar collection trends.

The system should be designed around open-source and readily available hardware, probably an Arduino or similar Atmel-based development board. It needs to collect hive weight, and probably temperature to allow temperature compensation if necessary, and it should collect between 1 and 24 datapoints per day and transmit them via GMS to the beekeeper.

The system will need to be run on a battery with solar recharging, so turning off power to the load cell and sleep modes will be important, although for this project, ease of build and use is critical as it's designed for commercial beekeepers, not hardware hackers.