This is an ongoing project but here’s where i’m at for now. After recently getting a puppy I was looking into what dog trackers are on the market an found all of them to either be Bluetooth based meaning a very short range of about 20 meters. Or GSM mobile carrier based costing a lot and and having to pay a monthly subscription.

I had heard of some new radio transmitters called LORA which in theory could transmit over 1/2 mile. So got hold of 2 and been experimenting if I could build something that would do the job of tracking an object over longer than Bluetooth and no monthly fee.

Firstly the tracker that goes on the dog would need, GPS (obviously other wise I wont know where it is), and the LORA transmitter to send a signal to a receiver and some form of arduino to do the processing. I chose a small nano one. That part was relatively easy to make and the test setup is below.

The receiver has to do a lot more work. It too needs know where it is, so needs a GPS. It needs the LORA chip to receive a signal from the tracker. It also needs a display to tell me where to head and what’s going on with the device. Lastly it needs a compass to tell me which direction to go. The outcome of that is you need all this on the receiver.

It’s at the stage now for testing it and with a lot of code on the receiver I had to change from an Arduino nano to a ESP8266 wemos device just to fit all the code in the memory. I’ve been running a few tests and to my surprise these little LORA chips are capable of sending a signal at least 200 meters through a pretty built up area. I’m still having a few issues with the compass module (its a cheap China clone model). So waiting on a different compass chip, when that arrives I’ll be able to test it out in an open space to see how far these LORA chips really can go.