Posts 12 comments on CatTrack 2.0 is on its way…!

CatTrack 2.0 is on its way…!

It’s been a while!

The last post I made here was July 2018… quite a lot has happened between then and now. Not only did Buttons sadly get involved in a car accident and need to have a leg amputated (don’t worry he’s fine and still himself!), but I also moved house and had a child.

Also there was a global pandemic.

Anyway enough of all that rubbish, the most important thing is that I’ve been working a little on Version 2 of CatTrack.

Continue Reading “CatTrack 2.0 is on its way…!”
Posts 8 comments on tl;dr complete version 1 build summary

tl;dr complete version 1 build summary

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!

Continue Reading “tl;dr complete version 1 build summary”

Posts 0 comments on What’s CatTrack?

What’s CatTrack?

Unsatisfied with the GPS trackers available on the market, I decided to design my own.  This site follows my component-level design and build of an ultra-low-power wireless cat tracker.

A few years ago we got some cats – Buttons and Turnip!  Buttons is the big tabby cat and that’s Turnip, below.

I would imagine that every cat-owning Engineer has at one point or another wondered about either buying or making a tracker for their cat so they can see what he or she gets up to after they jump over the garden wall.

Turnip isn’t like most cats.  There’s no need to make or buy a tracker for her because she hasn’t left the garden in 3 years.  Well, she did end up in next door’s garden once, but I got the impression from the noises she was making that it was incompetence that caused her to end up there, rather than a desire to be more than 10 feet away from her bed.

Buttons however, would benefit from a tracker.  Although he doesn’t disappear for days at a time like some cats, he is often nowhere to be seen, only to turn up a few hours later covered in cobwebs or some other kind of grime.

As you can read in my About Me page, I’ve got a fair bit of experience with electronic design.   It’s been my job for the last 10 years.  None of the cat trackers on the market fitted my needs (as I’ll explain in a separate post) so I decided to design and build one that’s much better than anything you can buy! (hopefully…)

I’ll be doing a component-level design, from schematics, through PCB design and ultimately casing it all up in a case appropriate for Buttons to carry around with him.  I’m sure there will be second revision too, to mop up all my cock-ups from the first revision!

This blog is partly a way to force myself to finish the project.  I wouldn’t want the 3 people reading this to be disappointed would I!

Posts 5 comments on Choosing a Power Source

Choosing a Power Source

The last thing I need to work out before getting on with the schematic is which battery chemistry I’m going to use.  The most important thing at this point isn’t necessarily identifying the exact battery I want to use, I need to just know the voltage, such that I can design the circuit to suit.

In order to work out the ideal battery chemistry, I need to work out how much each component draws, both in sleep mode and at its peak.

Continue Reading “Choosing a Power Source”