If the tree receiver (say) consumed 20mA, then the tree battery charge might last a couple of days (or make it a larger battery
for weekly replacement)
For now, let's make this simple:
Lets suppose I want to make a tag for 1 of my cats consisting of a transmitter (and possibly a receiver too, to tell the transmitter when to start transmitting which would be much more efficient), and a receiver attached to an arduino attached to my phone, RF at 433MHz with a range of 300m. And consider that the cat's tag is operating off 2 LR44 1.5V batteries.
Can I make anything small enough that will send a dumb signal to my arduino-receiver-phone thing?
The cat's transmitter only need to broadcast their ID, Ollie or Tiggy.
The receiver attached to my phone should pick up the signal when within 300m, and then it needs to very basically decode the signal for the ID and get the signal strength.
I understand that this won't be directional like the Loc8tor, but with atleast 3 nodes it will be quite accurate in telling me their position.
Anyway, for now, let's just imagine that this is all I want to do. 1 transmitter, 1 receiver.
What would I need to build this, and how would I build this. Please be detailed.
I appreciate all the other suggestions and all of your help, but I really just want to know how I would do this exactly. It can be improved upon later.
Thanks.
Power source is ALWAYS a concern for such projects. I admit I haven't looked into the power requirements, but here's some general thoughts --
* power-up only when needed, not all the time. Not so easy with GPS, since it takes a while to 'acquire' the satellites. Also I admit I haven't looked into how much juice GPS + 433Mhz Tx will consume. At least the Tx can be operated in burst mode only every N seconds/ minutes.
I've been googling this for ages and because I don't know very much I'm struggling to find an answer:
I want to find a very small PIC microcontroller, but not so small that I can't use a regular soldering iron. But just right. The goldilocks PIC.
I looked inside one of the Loc8tor tag and I could just about make out the writing on the microcontroller. It is a PIC16F636. Very Tiny. Too tiny in fact.
So, I Googled small microcontrollers and found this:
**broken link removed**
I think the size of the one on the right is necessary for the tags. Correct?
The basic chunky 8 pin PICs I ordered are just too big, so I cancelled them before dispatch.
Also, some questions:
Firstly, what do you call a small microcontroller?.... (this is not the feedline of a joke I've just thought of, I genuinely want to know if there is such a name for these special micro-microcontrollers)
Secondly, How do you program one of these tiny microcontrollers? I imagine you need an adapter of some sort with a normal microcontroller programmer.
Thirdly, Why don't vendors show the size of the PIC they're selling? I look at the specifications everywhere and they never show the dimensions!!! Why is that?
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