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Comment by herunan | Hacker News Reader

Love this project, although it makes me even more frustrated about how bad the pet-tracking business is right now. If you search for pet trackers on Amazon, it’s all these pesky devices with awkward shapes, high subscription costs and bad battery life. It’s pretty bad.

I currently rely on an AirTag, and for the most part it’s great as long as someone’s iPhone is nearby. However, I’m missing that GPS component.

I’d pay for this as I currently don’t have the time to build it nor the experience in building PCBs. Could be a fun project at some point, though.

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When I went down the rabbit hole of looking into pet trackers, the fact an iPhone needs to be nearby for AirTags to work is a problem to me, as well as the need for a SIM card in the tracker itself. I was thinking it could be nice to use a Zigbee type RF tranceiver as the range can be pretty fantastic [1] and they're very low power, and perhaps the base stations could forward messages they each received to each other to create a mesh across a neighbourhood to track far roaming cats. This wouldn't work for cats that go _really_ far (some can go several km in one day/night) but would for cats that only go a block or two. And the mesh could be used for any other item tracking needs too.

[1] https://lowpowerlab.com/forum/rf-range-antennas-rfm69-librar...

I was looking for a similar service to keep track of my wallet because I lost it a few months ago. I ran into all the same problems you mentioned. It blew my mind that I couldn't find a small device that took a sim card and just transmitted its location. I ended up tying my wallet to my backpack.

This cat tracker might just free my wallet from its paracord prison.

From my own experience, keep it. Maybe replace paracord with nice chain.

It prevents from losing the wallet in the first place, once it is lost it's a much bigger problem...

It's definitely on the expensive side, but the form factor on the newer fi collar model is _much_ better than before (important for me, having a small dog). Battery life is about as good (it dropped ~3-5% with a dogsitter as I was away for a week).

+1 for Fi, my beagle doesn’t mind the Gen 2 collar at all and it works great.

Yeah, it is thanks to the choice of a hybrid location service : at home it's only a few BLE packets and no 4G, but as soon the tracker is outside it's back to the hungry GPS chip and 4G data.

You cannot expect a 4G + GPS to have a long battery life.

I burnt myself once when I didn't do enough research and bought whatever was first in the Google search results.

Turned out to be a scam with legal address in farm in UK. Collar came but it was extremely poor quality, didn't match pics on the website, app was crap, GPS was not really working (it felt that it is tracking my phone's GPS that usually is off).

Can't get to trying another product.

We are using tractive for our cat. He is fairly active and the battery last around 2 days. Not awesome but also not that bad for the increased comfort that we know where he is.

With the collar that comes with it, he loses it every couple of weeks usually nearby bushes but we always find it and everything is good to go from there.

But it comes with a subscription.

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