Say hello to the £100 open source GPS collar.

Hello everyone! I figured I would do my first labnote on the collars which I am building for this project. In reality they are very simple but the process behind making them is complex. I will be sharing the construction of these collars not just here but other places online so that other people can construct them. 

The components themselves are:

The Adafruit feather m0 datalogger - a tiny arduino board with everything you need to control the collar, an SD card slot, battery connection and a microUSB connector to upload code, download data or charge the battery.

 

The Adafruit Ultimate GPS Featherwing - an all in one GPS breakout board that can be easily attached to the main board and has some great peripheral features.

 

The Adafruit LIS3DH Triple Axis Accelerometer - a very cheap but highly functional accelerometer breakout board which produces raw data of movement in all 3 axes.

 

A simple 3.3V 1200mAh lithium ion battery that is small lightweight and rechargeable.

 

These are all placed inside a 3D printed housing (http://www.thingiverse.com/thi...) that is printed to the exact size specifications of the parts and can be waterproofed and attached to any collar.

 

Here is a photo of the approximate size of the components next to a 50p

 

And finally the process of testing what circuitry to use.

 

The cost of these components comes to about £100 of course to build them you'll need to buy the equipment to construct them, the actual collar part, along with any modifications you want to make to the collar (like a drop off mechanism or secure attachments). And of course as with any field project you better have spare parts because something will always go wrong!

In a later labnote I will put up the code to program the collar to record the GPS and accelerometer data, sleep when not active etc.