Student: Andrei Ursulean (ACES)

The project aims to offer pet owners a way to track their small pet (about the size of a cat or a dog) in real time from anywhere. Using this product, they are aware of the current location of the pet, they can see a history and they can receive SMS alerts when the pet leaves a designated area. The system uses mobile data via LTE and GPRS so it is not dependent on WiFi which is useful for owners that own a house and leave their pet to roam free, but it is also useful for owners that keep their pets only indoor for the cases when the pet can escape. The application requires a mobile data plan which can be bought for ~2 Euro or a data + SMS (~6 Euro) if users want SMS alerts.

The project consists of an ESP32-WROVER SOC connected to an SIM7000G with LTE and GPS, a MicroSD card. The MCU communicates to the SIM/GPS module via UART and with the SD card via SPI.

Fig. 1 Hardware diagram

When the user first starts the application, the module creates a WiFi access point and the user must access the address of the tracker where it is presented with a web page. This is a configuration page where the user must input username and password, pet name, geofence definition and phone number for sms alerts. After that, the application runs as normal.

Fig. 2 Configuration page

Fig. 3 Software flowgraph

The software loop calculates GPS position, connects to the firebase database. In case the user is not authenticated, it must first get the authentication token and then it publishes the position and the timestamp to the database. When an update is received, it is displayed in the web page.

Fig. 4 Web Application Map

The main challenge in this project was that the