Via the About using electronic stuff blog: One day their beloved cat Milo went missing
…fortunately the worst things I started to imagine were false. Mio came back home. We conclude she might be being locked by mistake in a barn from the neighborhood. That’s where started the idea of a small RF beacon for Mio. It should to be very small, at least a month of battery life, and can enable a kind of search with a receiver.
Some tests were done with three different RF modules:
- A basic 315Mhz transmitter
- LoRa module based on SX1278 at 433MHz
- ST electronics module base on SPIRIT1 at 868Mhz
3D cases were printed for each module to use with a 3V coin cell. Studies started with the ST module:
I’m not sure about the reception range, is it enough to locate the beacon by walking around in the village? That’s why I should continue to study the other solutions. For example, I just saw it exists with a 433MHz ceramic antenna as well. Maybe it enables the use of the LoRa module at low power. They are still interesting as their modulation scheme makes the reception very sensitive.
This post is part 1 of a multipart investigation – we look forward to additional work.
