Some projects start as hacks, and end as products — that’s the case for [Akio Sato]’s project Loko, the LoRa/GPS tracker that was entered in our 2025 Pet Hacks Contest. The project dates all the way back to 2019 on Hackaday.io, and through its logs you can see its evolution up to the announcement that Loko is available from SeeedStudio.
It’s not a device necessarily limited to pets. In fact, the original use case appears to have been a backup locator beacon for lost drones. But it’s still a good fit for the contest none-the-less: at 12 grams, the tiny tracking device won’t bother even the most diminutive of pups, and will fit on any collar at only 30 mm x 23 mm. The “ground station” that pairs with your phone is a bit bigger, of course, but unless you have a Newfoundlander or a St. Bernard you’re likely bigger than fido. The devices use LoRa to provide a range up to 15 km — maybe better if you can loop them into a LoRaWAN. Depending on how often you pin the tracker, it can apparently last for as long as 270 days, which we really hope you won’t need to track a missing pet.
The hardware is based around Seeed’s Wio-E5 LoRa chip, which packages an STM32 with a LoRA radio. The firmware is written in MicroPython, and everything is available via GitHub under the MIT license. Though the code for the mobile app that interfaces with that hardware doesn’t appear to be in the repository at the moment. (There are folders, but they’re disappointingly empty.) The apps are available free on the iOS App Store and Google Play, however.
There’s still plenty of time to submit your own hacks to the Pet Hacks Contest, so please do! You have until May 10th, so if you haven’t started yet, it’s not too late to get hacking.
My capstone project was triangulation of livestock using LoRa radios
In hindsight, what a stupid project, I can’t believe my professors let me work on something so useless. What farmer would care where their cattle is, as long as they’re on the property?
Well the learning was well worth it though…
My final project for college involved tracking sailboats during a race and displaying that with weather measurements from the base station. When we talked to the head of the racing club, they were like, “Yeah, that’s useless to us, the conditions on the water are completely different than what the base station would see.”
But it’s more about demonstrating that you can see a complex project through to completion than necessarily delivering a useful product.
On the contrary, for some farmers that would be very useful.
May be different in the states, but I can see that being used in the UK.
If the cost is low enough it’s worth tagging all the animals them to detect theft (and potentially to help retrieval). And dairy farmers do want to know where their cows are and their movements – they usually use RFID tags and track them through milking, but tracking them across a wider area could be useful. It could also help detect animals that are ill.
I’ve been looking into buying one, it’s cool tech. Seems like you need one base station for each “tag”, though, which is inconvenient.
Can’t edit, so I’ll just reply to myself. When I looked into it before, they were only selling the “Air” and “Ground” units as a combo, but they just recently started selling the Air units separately. The page for the Air unit states that each Ground unit can track up to 30 of the Air units!
Commission? No, Money Down!
“There’s still plenty of time to submit your own hacks to the Pet Hacks Contest, so please do! You have until May 10th, so if you haven’t started yet, it’s not too late to get hacking.”
This sounds like too late to me?