Cat Tracking

Cat Tracking

Where the Hackaday Cat goes when she steps over the threshold into the wider world is a mystery, she reveals her whereabouts strictly on her terms and would we suspect be very cagey were we able to ask her about it. [Andy C] however has a need to know where his cat is spending her time, so he’s made a GPS collar for a bit of feline spying.

There are commercial GPS collars for pets, but they all share the flaw of extremely limited battery life. His challenge then was to create a collar that delivered the required pinpoint fix alongside a battery life measured in months. The solution was a combination of a low-power miniature GPS receiver and a low-power PC microcontroller hooked up to an FSK radio whose frequency he doesn’t give but which we suspect is probably the usual 433 MHz. The collar remains in low power mode until it receives a call on the FSK, at which point it wakes up, gets a GPS fix, transmits it, and returns to sleep.

The summary links to a series of posts which provide an extremely detailed look at all aspects of the project, and go well beyond mere GPS trackers for a cat. If you have an interest in low power devices or antenna matching for example, you’ll find a lot of interesting stuff in these pages. Of course, if all you need is a GPS tracker though, you may prefer a simpler option.

https://hackaday.com/2018/08/28/wheres-the-cat-locating-your-moggy-without-eating-batteries/

Goodbye McTavish

McTavish is gone now...

A good boy cat
He always used the litter box,
never bit a human,
never fought another cat

Harpo remains,
See the perplexed cat
In the background
Never reliable
In the categories declared

Cat On Purple

I promise I will not turn this into a blog about my cats. But I like this pic.

Two Cats In a Pod

Good-Bye to Sammy

Sammy is now gone. It was a sad Sunday


Sammy, 2002 -2011

A Cat That Makes Me Mad!!

"Rocket!!" He jumps in at me and lands in my glass of red wine and it spills all over our couch.

OK, it is really old and has many previous stains, but still...cats can be a pain!!

---

And this is the wine that I succumbed to and broke my weekday non wine practice.

I still need to consider if I like it. I drank it all when I should have had none.