Tiny enclosure for Nano, LoRa and TinyGPS

Hello Forum,

I'm looking into making a livestock tracker for our sheep which will consist of a collar and an enclosure small enough not to cause the animal problems, but big enough the house the items mentioned in the title, in addition to a small lipo battery. I also need to be able to fix a tiny solar panel on there to charge the lipo.

On that point, what would be a good way to charge the lipo? Is there a mcu available with this functionality?

My main question here is where I could look for enclosures that would fit this bill.

This is at the very beginning of the idea, so any advice or ideas very welcome.

Thanks,
Hein

My first stop for enclosure shopping is Aliexpress because they usually have the best prices. There are enclosures of all sizes there. I got some super small extruded aluminum enclosures that are nice but I think you'll want to go with plastic since you'll be wanting waterproof and also probably don't want metal blocking the radio communications.

Since you're buying a lot of enclosures, I would do some shopping around. Some of the enclosures are a little cheaper on eBay. You can also get enclosures from the component distributors like Digikey, Mouser, etc. They tend to have higher prices once you add in the shipping but they might have some items not sold on Aliexpress/eBay and you also avoid having to wait forever for shipping from China.

If you find that none of the commercial enclosures are just the right size, you could consider 3D printing, which would allow you to customize the enclosure to your specific needs.

Hammond 1553 enclosures come in a variety of sizes. There are a couple smaller ones around 1.5" in length that have mounting ears that you could pass a collar through.

I'm not in my lab right now or I could give you a specific part#, but Digikey carries them.

On charging, I used the Adafruit FeatherLoggers that have LiPo charging built in for this project:
http://www.cedarlakeinstruments.com/blog/contact/recent-work/

The logger at the top of the page is in a translucent blue Hammond 1553 enclosure (so the status LEDs could be seen), but it's one of the larger ones. They make them half that size.