Meshtastic Pet Tracking

Four black plastic devices, two with a black, stubby antenna, sit on a blue cutting mat with white guidelines. There is also a PCB and a couple grey-ish clips in the assortment. One of the devices is open, showing another PCB with various components including a GPS antenna and LoRa radio. A silhouette of a dog is screen printed next to the text "LIA" on the PCBs, and the same text and image is present in the shell of the device in the top center.

Most commercial pet trackers require a subscription or network connection to function. [Jon G Aguado] wanted a better way and designed LIA, a Meshtastic collar tracker.

LIA uses a custom PCB containing a ESP32-S3, LoRa radio, GPS/GNSS receiver, and a charge controller for the 18650 or 5023450 pouch Li-ion cell powering the device. Everything fits inside a 3D printed enclosure, and the device is charged via a magnetic 4-pin USB pogo connector to increase weather resistance.

One of the neat features of this particular tracker is that [Aguado] gave it two different power modes. High power gets a location fix every 30 seconds and has a pair of bright LEDs for visual assistance, low power only gets a fix every minute or so, and it can also be set to off, which is something we wish more device manufacturers remembered should be an option.

We hope anyone planning on using Meshtastic and LoRa in the US is aware of the issues surrounding FCC compliance, and if you want to track your pet another way, maybe KineFox is an option?

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