Most commercial pet trackers require a subscription or network connection to function. [Jon G Aguado] wanted a better way and designed LIA, a Meshtastic collar tracker.
LIA uses a custom PCB containing a ESP32-S3, LoRa radio, GPS/GNSS receiver, and a charge controller for the 18650 or 5023450 pouch Li-ion cell powering the device. Everything fits inside a 3D printed enclosure, and the device is charged via a magnetic 4-pin USB pogo connector to increase weather resistance.
One of the neat features of this particular tracker is that [Aguado] gave it two different power modes. High power gets a location fix every 30 seconds and has a pair of bright LEDs for visual assistance, low power only gets a fix every minute or so, and it can also be set to off, which is something we wish more device manufacturers remembered should be an option.
We hope anyone planning on using Meshtastic and LoRa in the US is aware of the issues surrounding FCC compliance, and if you want to track your pet another way, maybe KineFox is an option?
When I first read the headline, I thought the post were about tracking PET (plastic) recycling.
Mwhuaahahahaaa …
Does anyone have a rough estimate of the cost of pcb and parts?
I know i could just upload the provided files to a manufacturing service, but I don’t have an account with seed fusion, and maybe someone else already has a rough ballpark number at the ready?
I hope he linked it to meshmapper as well! heh. Warpetting?
Still not as bad as what a certain camera doorbell manufacturer was planning on giving to the general public. Although I do wonder if it’s not been retained at some level. At least something like meshtastic is still more or less under the control of the end user by design.
this is big in my community. we are very rural. ive designed several pet trackers based on the heltec v4 for a handful of my neighbors, for free, as long as theyve contributed to expanding our groups infrastructure by setting up a base node or repeater. this design here is cool but from experience the form and antenna attachment is likely to get snagged on brush or caked with mud. i have since switched to an outer adhesive antenna. something like how the sensecap antenna is assembled, only mine is sealed in resin on the outer case wall. provided the infrastructure has no gaps the transmission is never missed. its also minimized the amount of “my dog got out again, has anyone seen them” posts on FB.
Have you published anything on your device?
You should share more of this, sounds great
Cool cool cool but that thing is almost bigger than my cat.
How low power can ESP32-S3 get? iirc there was a quirk where the actually decent low power modes of ESP32 family of chips were only possible if you were okay with the application resetting the CPU after sleep, no way to have __WFI() or similar scheme where code continued after waking up. You had to store the application state in NVS for this to work, which was just not good for flash life, in general. Or an external EEPROM.
And even then the sleep modes were not very good, more than 20uA or so even at the lowest one. Much worse than Nordic, STMicro or SiLabs offerings
I may be remembering wrong though
If using RTC timer, can store data in RTC memory with RTC_DATA_ATTR , see
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32s3/api-guides/deep-sleep-stub.html#load-wake-stub-data-into-rtc-memory
Between 7uA and 10uA while sleeping.
Does anyone know what the state of the Meshtastic code is… with respect to the FCC violation seemingly implicit in its current form?
Has FCC- compliant code been released, yet?