Context & Motivation

  • An engineer in Duivendrecht, near Amsterdam, wanted safe outdoor roaming for his cat Escobar.

  • Commercial trackers (Invoxia, Findster, Tractive, AirTags) failed due to poor coverage, high SIM fees, sluggish updates, or excessive bulk.

Chosen solution

  1. LoRaWAN + TTN gateway

    • Deployed indoor TTN LoRaWAN gateway (~€70), extended range via external antenna setup (Aurel GP‑868 + cable) 

  2. Tracker hardware

    • Selected BroWAN Object Locator: 28 g, 540 mAh battery, movement-activated, ~8–10 hr life at 1 min intervals, 1 km range.

    • Cat harness modified with Velcro pockets to hold BroWAN, Findster (backup), Tile (local buzzer) 

Functionality & pros/cons

  • LoRa sends ~50 bytes uplink per minute with GPS & battery data; TTN gateway forwards via console/API 

  • Lacked buzzer in BroWAN; Findster & Tile added to assist locating when nearby 

  • Setup supports low-cost transmissions over community TTN mesh with no SIM fees.

Software stack

  1. TTN console configures device/app and byte parser.

  2. HTTP integration pushes data to custom backend (Scala + TypeScript).

  3. Real-time route tracking via websockets in browser