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ENadyr
doakes
I made something similar for my dog. Arduino Nano, GPS module, LoRa module, 18650 battery, and an antenna. I then had a "base station" using ESP8266 with a LoRa module and antenna that would forward the GPS data to the cloud. I was in a heavily wooded area and the LoRa signal would start dropping around 1000ft. I didn't know free SIM data was a possibility via Hologram.io or I probably would've gone that route.
I really don't like the idea of attaching a lithium ion battery to my dog's neck, and I never learned how to design PCB's, so I'd also like to revisit my project with some improvements.
witx
Looks really good, and I'm happy there's an open source version of this. With that said, who's going to put such a big gadget around their cats' neck? I'm envisioning a cat getting stuck by that collar somewhere and suffocating. I think in its current version its better for big dogs
Still I hope to see new and improved iteration of it!
sillysaurusx
They’re pretty tiny. “Mr Lee CatTrack" did this in 2014 with little more than a SIM card and a gps, which was small. This one doesn’t seem much bigger.
Back in 2012 I was using a Zoombak for my cats, which was designed for dogs. Eventually one of them started getting less and less fur under his collar because the Zoombak was wiggling back and forth as he was running, causing the collar to chafe.
He didn’t seem to mind it though, and eventually he’d recognize my car as I drove to pick him up. He’d jump into the back seat like a dog right when the door opened. I miss that fella.
michaelt
There's small and there's small.
For a traditional cat collar, you might have an engraved nametag the size of a quarter. Even an apple airtag is clunky in comparison - and this thing looks several times the size of an airtag.
It's impressively small for something with LTE, and a multi-month battery life, it's just a lot bigger than a quarter.
dhritzkiv
Cat collars getting stuck can be a problem regardless of a bulky item being attached (though, it will probably be exacerbated by a tracker), so a breakaway/quick-release collar is a good idea in any case.
thr0w__4w4y
This is (unfortunately) very, very true. I don't have firsthand experience, thankfully, but 2x secondhand experience, and I cannot think about those two cases without getting tears in my eyes. It's not common, but uncommon things happen all the time in large populations.
michelb
Looking at some existing tags this one looks small actually.
ajb
This is great. Looks a tad big, would be good to know it's measurements
The main missing thing from this is waterproof design. Doesn't need to survive immersion (unless you have a Turkish Van) but it will get damp as the cat pushes through wet undergrowth or if the cat gets caught by a sudden shower.
Main things would be an ip67 rated usb connector, and a channel for rubber seal along the case join.
(edited to add)
From the STL, this is much bigger than a tabcat. The tabcat is 23x33x12mm in its silicone cover. This is ~27x60x13mm.
Another handy feaure of the tabcat (although not essential) is a beeper.
leros
I've tried all the major pet trackers. Most of them are too big for cats. Many of them are just Bluetooth which doesn't help at all when your cat gets far away. The better ones have Bluetooth, wifi, LTE, and GPS.
The ones with more than Bluetooth try to be clever to preserve power and only enable the other radios in certain situations. I haven't found one that does this well yet. I would prefer they use more power and track better. For something moving like a cat, you really need better tracking.
There are a few uses cases I want to work well:
1) I want to know when my cat leaves home and then be able to find him with realtime GPS.
2) I want to find my cat when he's home. He can easily decide to nap under a bush in my yard and then he's impossible to find.
The most common one I see people using is Tractive. I personally found it literally useless. When you're close to home, it only enables Bluetooth and your phone app is basically looking for the signal strength of the tracker's Bluetooth. I found that my phone (Samsung Ultra S22) didn't sense my cat unless I was 15-20ft away, which isn't very helpful as I already have to know where he is.
The one I decided to use is JioBit. When you're close to home (based on it sensing your home wifi) it only has Bluetooth enabled but it makes a connection to your phone. I found this to work over about 50ft. When connected, you can ring a bell on the tracker and find your cat. Pretty useful. When your cat is away from home, it only updates the GPS location every 5-15 minutes over LTE which I find too infrequent. Another annoyance is that it only does GPS tracking when your cat is too far from your home wifi. My cat can get way beyond Bluetooth range but still close enough to detect my wifi and then I have no tracking at all.
What I would really like is something like the JioBit but with better connectivity. I want:
1) It to check in with a server every few minutes. Using wifi when home or LTE when not home. I want this because I want to be able to enable realtime gps tracking when I'm looking for my cat.
2) When realtime tracking is enabled, actually be realtime. Give me updates every 15 seconds at least.
3) Give me the ability to ring the device over wifi or LTE.
The JioBit can last a few weeks in its current mode. I'm willing to cut that down significantly. And I really don't mind it burning power when I'm actively trying to find my cat.
gwoplock
WiFi and LTE are too power intensive for a pet tracker in my opinion. Something like LoRaWAN would be ideal. In urban areas public LoRaWAN coverage already exists and where it doesn't the coverage of one gateway would likely be far greater than a cat's roaming range. Bandwidth shouldn't be an issue either as a GPS point (without elevation) would easily fit inside the smallest LoRa packet.
You'd be able to do the switch over from low frequency check-ins to high frequency with the RX slot that comes after a TX slot, but the only issue would be having to wait for a check-in before the realtime mode is activated. But with a sufficient, ~5 minute, low-frequency check-in period, I'd imagine that's a small inconvenience.
deirdresm
I've got a really wandery cat whose range is about 1-1.5km in any direction from the house. We try to keep her within 0.5km as much as possible. If we didn't manage her location fairly actively, she'd probably wander farther.
deirdresm
I've been using FitBark for the last 2-1/2 years.
The catch is that my cat's use case (being mostly outdoors, mostly out of Bluetooth range, and mostly draining power) doesn't match the engineering design model of a dog who's with you most of the time and might escape on occasion. They gave me a more power-conserving build, though.
The one anomaly here is one I've noticed with Pokémon Go as well: "rounding" locations to be at the street even when the cat isn't even within BT range of the street. (For privacy reasons in PoGo's case, after multiple lawsuits.) The one time this is particularly annoying is when our fuzzball is hunting lizards in the local schoolyard at night, and the tracker says she's on the street next to the schoolyard, but she's somewhere in the middle of it.
In practice, that means I know where my little darling was 10 minutes ago, rounded to the nearest street, and use a Bluetooth tracking app to narrow it down further. Naturally, a good third of the time, she's within BT range and just Not Interested™ in moving from wherever she happens to be. (We try to keep her fed on a regular schedule to reduce wildlife consumption.)
We're going to try FindMyCat on the other cat (who currently doesn't have a tracker) and see how that goes. He spends more time at home.
foobarqux
One imperfect option is the Mictrack MT710 https://www.mictrack.com/product/cat-m1-nb-iot-pet-gps-track...
A bit too big for a cat. Also doesn't have bluetooth or a speaker so you can't narrow the location once you get close (you could add an airtag for that, more $, more bulk).
Waterproof.
Relatively inexpensive.
Has a documented API or you can use the Petovik app to track 1 item for free.
Can change modes by sending a command through the SIM providers SMS command or through one of the tools linked in the Petovik app (the command is only received when the device is "awake"). The modes with highest resolution allows 10 sec updates. There is also a "LOCK" mode which lets you switch to high frequency updates for a specified period of time.
Battery life is almost a day if you use "sleep when not moving mode" and set updates to every 2 minutes or so.
deirdresm
Definitely too big. I use the FitBark GPS 2: https://help.fitbark.com/en/articles/6999814-what-are-the-fi...
Which is 47 mm x 30 mm x 15 mm vs the Mictrack's 46mm x 41mm x 16mm - and that 11 extra mm would make it not work on a collar. Fitbark does have Bluetooth.
Mictrack
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lozenge
Can you run a deliberately weak or inward facing Wi-Fi network?
I don't understand how that location is too infrequent. Too infrequent for what? If you are trying to chase them around the garden then an audible ringer is going to be better than 15 second updates.
lxe
> I want to know when my cat leaves home
I keep dreaming up a very simple (ish) solution involving a never-obstructed camera at ingress points like a doorway where it can reliably track whether the cat is in our out of the house without relying on a hefty device they have to wear.
Mictrack
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whalesalad
I have one of these for my dog (https://tryfi.com/) which has saved my GSD a number of times after running wild out in the woods of Northern Michigan. The battery lasts for months in normal operating mode but can be put into "lost mode" remotely where it will ping towers aggressively and give a precise location. This open source solution looks very polished and comprehensive though.
demondemidi
Months of battery life with gps is impossible.
It is 20 hours in gps mode:
https://www.findmycat.io/docs/TrackerModes#summary
I have a Jiobit. It starts in ble mode and switches to gps when the cat exits a 30 m radius. It gets about 8 hours of fulll gps gsm battery life once it starts updating every 60 seconds. Normally it is 2 weeks battery life.
Note I take my cat out supervised in a large fenced in yard. He got away from me thrice over seven years. This is just a temporary safety feature now. He’s never ventured more than 100m during his getaways.
paxys
It is not impossible if the GPS is off by default. Battery life is 20 hours only in "lost mode", aka when the location is being updated every 30 seconds. If you don't need that, and are okay with updates on demand, it can last a year.
demondemidi
Obviously.
0xFF0123
This was unnecessarily snarky in an otherwise insightful discussion.
wussboy
It wasn’t obvious to me.
h1fra
I don't know much about GPS, but I always assumed it was a passive tech. What is consuming battery in that case?
krisoft
It is a lot of work to acquire and track the signals and this is often implemented in software. And then afterwards it takes a lot of work to calculate the navigational solution from these raw measurements.
This basically keeps a microprocessor busy which uses energy.
One trick people do for ultra-low energy non-realtime GPS tracking of wildlife is to store the “raw” radio samples and do as little processing on the tracking device as possible.[1] Then once the tracker gets back they batch process all the samples recorded and reconstruct where the animal has been. That is obviously a tradeoff of more storage used for less energy consumption. Obviously that trick does not work if you want to know where the animal is live, it can only tell you where it has been once you have processed the data.
OmarShehata
> Obviously that trick does not work if you want to know where the animal is live, it can only tell you where it has been once you have processed the data.
why can't you just forward those radio samples back, and process that on the receiver end (your phone), vs processing on device and sending back the location?
It should be a tradeoff of less battery consumption on device, and no need for large storage, at the expense of a lot more bandwidth? Would having to send all the raw samples consume more or less battery than just processing it and sending the result?
solardev
Really? It's the math that's power hungry, not something to do with the antenna or whatever...? I'm surprised.
joshspankit
Are there no hobby-level GPS chips that do hardware decoding?
h1fra
Ah I see, the continuous tracking is the culprit here. Thanks
dreamcompiler
GPS receivers are passive only in the sense that they don't transmit. But pulling a meaningful signal from a 25W transmitter 20,000 km away requires some seriously power-hungry signal processing. It's an engineering miracle that it works at all.
ilyt
The fact GPS satellites are 20k km away
Weak signal, small antenna, high gain, lots of current to run amplifiers. And you need to keep receiving signal to get the position, not just enable it for a second then disable
e44858
You also have an LTE modem transmitting the GPS coordinates to the cell tower.
dboreham
It's not passive. There's a bunch of DSP on the RF plus regular CPU on computing the location from the demo demodulated signals. 32-bit CPU.
helsinkiandrew
20 hours for Lost Mode seems much too low. Ideally if away from home for a certain period (or if no motion is detected - I'm not sure if the device has the technology) it should go into sending out position every hour rather than 30s so it can last indefinitely - days/weeks atleast (like some vehicle trackers do)
gitgud
> Months of battery life with gps is impossible.
Apple air tags last for 12 months apparently
wccrawford
They aren't GPS. They rely on a proprietary network of devices from one of the biggest tech giants in the world.
rplnt
That's why Apple makes it so damn hard (compared to any Android I've ever owned) to turn off Location, Bluetooth (and maybe WiFi) on their mobile devices.
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lagolinguini
My cat was missing for a few days about a month ago. It was really stressful. Currently, I’ve put an AirTag on her which works okay since she’s an outdoor cat but I still get paranoid when FindMy hasn’t updated in a while. I would really love to support this project!
aivisol
Our cat once disappeared for a week and we still have no idea where he has been. We have already said good bye since we presumed it got caught by a fox or some other predator. Returned exactly 7 days later as nothing happened, in good shape, not particularly hungry, nor dirty. Go figure!
elzbardico
Some cats have multiple houses. Lots of people love cats, and if a cat starts frequenting their houses, they will start feeding them and kind of adopting them. Cat lives in the new house for a few days, then go back to original house, stay for a while, and go to the second house, and so on.
aivisol
We considered this option, and since we live in a remote countryside, we actually asked the neighbors around in few km radius. None knew anything. Mystery still unsolved. Happened only once.
franzb
Happens to mine all the time! I figured a while back that he was just staying on the outdoor bench of a neighbor, and he had access to the food of her cats.
peteforde
I think that this is brilliant. I'd buy two.
Important to note that this fellow has already published detailed engineering notes, BOMs, all of the gerbers. I believe this really matters when taking this to KickStarter, which is exactly what he should do.
One thing to consider is that many animals will not wear collars. However, they might wear a well-designed harness.
herunan
Love this project, although it makes me even more frustrated about how bad the pet-tracking business is right now. If you search for pet trackers on Amazon, it’s all these pesky devices with awkward shapes, high subscription costs and bad battery life. It’s pretty bad.
I currently rely on an AirTag, and for the most part it’s great as long as someone’s iPhone is nearby. However, I’m missing that GPS component.
I’d pay for this as I currently don’t have the time to build it nor the experience in building PCBs. Could be a fun project at some point, though.
ssl232
When I went down the rabbit hole of looking into pet trackers, the fact an iPhone needs to be nearby for AirTags to work is a problem to me, as well as the need for a SIM card in the tracker itself. I was thinking it could be nice to use a Zigbee type RF tranceiver as the range can be pretty fantastic [1] and they're very low power, and perhaps the base stations could forward messages they each received to each other to create a mesh across a neighbourhood to track far roaming cats. This wouldn't work for cats that go _really_ far (some can go several km in one day/night) but would for cats that only go a block or two. And the mesh could be used for any other item tracking needs too.
[1] https://lowpowerlab.com/forum/rf-range-antennas-rfm69-librar...
troyvit
I was looking for a similar service to keep track of my wallet because I lost it a few months ago. I ran into all the same problems you mentioned. It blew my mind that I couldn't find a small device that took a sim card and just transmitted its location. I ended up tying my wallet to my backpack.
This cat tracker might just free my wallet from its paracord prison.
ilyt
From my own experience, keep it. Maybe replace paracord with nice chain.
It prevents from losing the wallet in the first place, once it is lost it's a much bigger problem...
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occams_chainsaw
It's definitely on the expensive side, but the form factor on the newer fi collar model is _much_ better than before (important for me, having a small dog). Battery life is about as good (it dropped ~3-5% with a dogsitter as I was away for a week).
doublepg23
+1 for Fi, my beagle doesn’t mind the Gen 2 collar at all and it works great.
olabyne
Yeah, it is thanks to the choice of a hybrid location service : at home it's only a few BLE packets and no 4G, but as soon the tracker is outside it's back to the hungry GPS chip and 4G data.
You cannot expect a 4G + GPS to have a long battery life.
ajja
I burnt myself once when I didn't do enough research and bought whatever was first in the Google search results.
Turned out to be a scam with legal address in farm in UK. Collar came but it was extremely poor quality, didn't match pics on the website, app was crap, GPS was not really working (it felt that it is tracking my phone's GPS that usually is off).
Can't get to trying another product.
phumberdroz
We are using tractive for our cat. He is fairly active and the battery last around 2 days. Not awesome but also not that bad for the increased comfort that we know where he is.
With the collar that comes with it, he loses it every couple of weeks usually nearby bushes but we always find it and everything is good to go from there.
But it comes with a subscription.
c_o_n_v_e_x
I was a product manager for a personnel tracking solution that relied on a bluetooth-like technology.
I don't remember how it started exactly, but given the number of cat owners on the team, I started joking that I wanted to repurpose our tech and start a cat tracking app called "locatify."
Not only has the name locatify since been taken, I keep seeing references to cat tracking solutions everywhere!
jstarfish
I once created a spiked floormat intended for feline area denial.
I wanted to call it Pussy Control but my wife wouldn't let me.
pndy
Looks interesting but I can't imagine my cat wearing this - she'd try to remove it; case is quite big and would annoy her
lagolinguini
First prototype is great anyway. Could be made smaller over subsequent iterations!
Nextgrid
Wondering if flex PCBs would allow to redistribute some of the components around the collar instead of having them as one big chunk.
SideburnsOfDoom
Better to wait for v2 or later of "the ultimate solution for pet tracking" (from the video).
SideburnsOfDoom
Indeed, it looks very large for a small feline to wear. It would be useful as a "find my large dog".
Raed667
the answer to find my large dog is usually: snoring under the desk.
SideburnsOfDoom
Your dog's mileage may vary, depending on breed and age of the dog.
agilob
This shouldn't be for cats only, but a general OSS GPS tracker for vehicles too (I know it can be used for that), lots of people from home-assistant community will be interested in it.
michaelt
It could probably track vehicles, sure.
But vehicles don't need the indoor tracking, or the home base station, and when moving have nigh-unlimited battery power available.
So I imagine it depends on how much those features are adding to the price. Also, it looks like the device isn't commercially available, and with BGAs etc it's not easy to DIY either.
deepspace
Yes, this is mostly a solved problem for vehicles. I have a tracker in my car that does not even connect to the electrical system. It is a somewhat bulky brick with a battery that lasts 4–6 months. Smaller units are available, trading off battery life for size.
The cost of the device is less than $100, excluding the cellular data cost.
agilob
Is it opensource tho?
troyvit
Dang, lost my car. peeks under bed Theeeere you are lil' fella!
tyingq
It's a common "market segmentation" approach. They can make different sites/pitches for other markets.
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I'm impressed with this project! I built something similar a couple of years ago but it wasn't as polished. This is a prime example of a well-executed open-source hardware (OSHW) project.
I also noticed, like others here, that the tracker's size is a problem. My cat managed to remove the collar with my smaller tracker in just two minutes. I've been considering designing an even more compact tracker, integrating it into the collar itself. It would include a battery, GPS, LoRa with an antenna, and a microcontroller with power management. I'd use a small Heltec LoRa+Bluetooth transceiver for this.
Your work has inspired me to revisit my old project. Thanks!