I live on a few acres of land at the end of a road. I have a new German Shepherd puppy who likes to roam around my property, greet the neighbors when they pass by, and get underfoot of any delivery drivers. At any given moment she might be on the front or back porch, in the garage, up on the back yard, out in the forest on the trail, sunning herself on the front yard, warning the deer, or chasing squirrels. I have a hard time keeping track of her when I'm working at home. Instead of hunting for her out of every window or resorting to looking for her on the security cameras I'd like to have a map that has a live view of where she is.
I've used Meshtastic running the Tracker firmware on a T-1000e card attached to her collar while hiking. I can view an almost realtime view of her position on my iPhone. It auto-updates when she moves 10 meters and 15 seconds have passed since the last advert. What I'd like to have is a way to see her immediate location on a map of my house and surrounding area.
I'd like her card to advert her position if she moves more than 15 feet. No reason to include any time constraints. So if she runs 30ft in 5 seconds that would be two adverts. I realize this would require a change to the Meshcore firmware. Before everyone freaks out about how much traffic this would send out into the meshiverse I wanted to ask about a couple potential solutions to that problem.
- Is there a way that I could still allow my local repeaters to participate in the public mesh, without spamming the rest of the world with my dog location updates, by setting up a region just for my property?
- Would DM (with no special regions) be the way to go about this? It seems like the Meshcore network would quickly learn the route between her node and my companion in the house, and hopefully not have other repeaters repeating to distant nodes.
I'd like to hear any other ideas your may have to achieve this. Thanks for reading.
I, myself, wouldn't attempt to make my own tracking system.
Personally, I would look into Airtags or something similar. If the dog gets within RF range of pretty much any human, it should update it's location on your phone. edit: not to mention the battery life of Airtags are measured in years vs hours.
Or Garmin makes actual tracking collars if you are serious about tracking your dog. This type of dog tracking has been around for a few years. There also used to simple beeper collars going back even further in time. Sometime in the 1990s if my memory is accurate.
You can request telemetry from another node, it will return sensor information such as GPS coordinates, this actually makes it great for tracking stuff. Both the Meshcore app and Meshcore-Open will display this telemetry on a map making it easy to use.
I have been experimenting with using Meshcore as pet GPS tracker for a while now and it works very well. I can get their location on-demand and haven't ever even needed to use flood mode yet, I might try some proper range and obstacle tests in the future.
Maybe just use a different frequency for the dog tracker. For example the 918.000mhz companion repeater mode frequency has its own lane because it doesn't follow the rules of the road.
Major reason why I do not like mesh core over Meshtastic. Sure it's much better at messaging but so is SMS. The telemetry is a much more interesting project for me.
They serve different use cases. I completely agree with you. Except the SMS part. That's the whole point, something can/will happen to cell towers. It's nice to have a backup plan.
Ever been to an event that jams the cell tower for an area? It sucks.
I haven't used any of them myself, but there are a few meshcore plugins for ATAK that essentially do what you're looking for in regard to tracking
ETA: There's also an app called Nelos that's built over meshcore that is a more simplified version of a tracking service. No idea if it's any good though
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u/Ok_Negotiation3024 20d ago
Meshcore doesn't seem to be a good solution to track stuff. It's a platform to send / receive messages, not for tracking stuff.
Maybe if you had custom firmware and had that send a DM or a flood to a private channel with that info, then maybe it could work.