I have a colleague who has some animals on his property, I think about 50 cows.
His entire rural property is covered by internet signal.
I intend to put a GPS module connected to a battery on a collar and create an application in the inventor app so that he can see the animals in real time as dots on his cell phone screen.
I'm looking for a GPS module with excellent battery life.
I did a lot of research on aliexpress. There are ready-made trackers, including solar.
But these ready-made ones send location signals directly to their own URLs and apps.
I believe that in my case even an ESP32-C3 and a NEO-6M module would work because, as I said, there is internet available throughout the property.
But is there a GPS module, low price, very low consumption, with a built-in controller ? Just stay sending the coordinates to the app every x minutes ?
Or they stay in sleep mode and when I send a command from my cell phone, everyone wakes up and sends their coordinates. The goal is for the battery to last months.
If anyone can and wants to help by posting links or tips. I thank.
The Ublox 8 did fairly well with a projected battery life of 195 days based on sending a fix every 10 minutes.
However electronics aside the major issue with such a tracker is finding or designing a suitably robust and waterproof package, perhaps the problem to be solved first.
Think.
How is the receiver going to be activly listening for an incoming signal whilst being asleep at the same time ?
If you just require a rough location then maybe have some very low power transmitters around the field (bluetooth?) and the modules can report back which they are able to see.
In fact if they just periodically wake up, transmit their id and go back to sleep this would make the modules on the animals very simple and the receivers could keep a log of which they received and when.
After much research I understood that there are two most common ways of tracking animals in a pasture. One of them is via cell phone signal. An M2M chip here in Brazil costs on average 1 dollar per month per animal (10 Mb plan).
Another solution is to use LoRa. But there are several problems with both solutions. The battery would have to be solar charged as it would be unfeasible to keep changing (charging) the battery for 100-200 animals. Although I have seen videos of LoRa signal range tests, some of which are impressive, I believe that it is not easy to face obstacles such as hills, trees, etc.
There are more problematic details. But I don't want to turn this Post into a book. So I would like to know your opinion on the idea of spreading some powerful wifi signal repeaters around the property.
***Don't read this, see post#13 *****
I saw some on Aliexpress with a promise of a range of 1.2 km (1200 meters).
About ten repeaters managed to cover up to 10km. The battery problem would not be solved, but the hardware in each animal would be simpler (just GPS and any ESP).
Running electrically powered wires to each repeater would also be a challenge.
