There are a lot of posts to trawl through in this blog if you’ve not followed it from the beginning. Hopefully this summary makes everything a bit clearer…
The first thing I did was to have a look at other cat tracking products on the market. I found that they all have a big flaw… battery life. I wanted GPS level accuracy and a battery life measured in months. Nothing on the market offered that, so it was down to me to design it!
I’ve now written enough code for the PIC on the CatTrack base station such that I can begin to test it!
I’ve already tested comms with the CatTrack collar, using a development board instead of the base station. Read about that here.
Unfortunately, when testing my base station I found that it was nowhere near as sensitive as the development board – the base station was getting CRC errors whilst the development board was still receiving the signal fine. After a small bit of investigation I found out why. The problem is all down to the fact that I want to use the CC1125 at the lowest baud rate (300 bps), and consequently a very narrow receive bandwidth (3.8 kHz).
Continue Reading “Long Range Communications with the CC1125”
I’ve finished laying out the base station PCB, hurrah!
As ever I’ve laid it out using Eagle – this time I’ve managed to keep it to two layers so that’ll save me some money in PCB manufacture costs. Click it to enlarge.
The time has finally arrived, let’s test CatTrack on Buttons.
It doesn’t seem to bother him anyway!
I’ve pretty much ruled out any kind of design that requires a continuous connection via cellular modem.
The advantage of a continuous cellular connection is that I would be able to remotely send a query to the collar (either via SMS or a data connection) and get it to report its location back to me, from anywhere in the world.
