Smart animal control

The goal of the project is to design a control device to control the livestocks in the rancher away from an exclusive region,providing a non-gps, low power consumption and low cost solution.

=Problem Definition=

Nowadays, many companies had provide solutions of GPS virtual fencing systems in order to remove the high cost iron fences, providing possibility to control livestock’s outside the rancher with mobile devices. However, the gps is quiet expensive and somrtime its hard to receive signal from satelites Thus, our goal is to design a budget friendly, low power consumption wireless fencing system, with local transmission network. To be specific, the cost on every animal should be around or under $50, and capable of working with out charge for at least a month.

=Design Considerations= The rancher require a wireless control system without gps or internet access,so we first consider some wireless signal options.At the begining we list sevral approaches(Wifi,ZIgbee,Bluetooth,NFC,nRF24l01),after comparison we exclude wifi(too much bandwith for our purpose compare to zigbee),Bluetooth(HIgher power consumption),and combined nRF and nfc into nRf24le1 + RFID. According to our client, the main issue this device aims to solve is to prevent livestock in the rancher enter a stream surrounded with plants, where they want to protect.Different from the inclusion part, what we will do is place beacons along the borders of the “don’t enter area”.

The benefit of this approach is it has better flexibility. Not only can we prevent animals away from the stream, we can also circle a certain area and exclude the cows from it, such as dangerous zone, construction site, grass regeneration etc. since the architecture is based on small beacons, we can easily change the borders too. Meanwhile, figured out by one of the teachers, maybe we can even mount the device on some drones, becoming a “virtual cowboy”.

With Zigbee,we're aiming at creating a local internet in order to communicate device on livestocks and the base stations.With this option,Hopefully we can develop a RSSI function thus we can know where the livestock located. Onther other hand, the nRf24le1 option leaves us lower power consumption since the device on the livestock,RFID,is an half-passive device(according onr of our member suggested).Also,this choice might provider lager transmittion range.

=Project Learning= The main idea of this project is to create a non-gps based control system, so we first went into some searching in wireless transmitter. At the very beginning, we were planning to use interphone or other similar stuff. But these stuff cannot satisfy our low-energy-cost requirement, so we turned into some ultra-low transceiver chips.

We are now divided into 2 small groups, using 2 sets of chips at the same time in order to compare them.

First,The nrf24l01 group, or the exclusion group. THis group aims to keep the live stock away from specific area by creating several base transmitter around the edge of the exclusive zone. Due to the simple structure of nrf24l01, this choice would cost lower power consumption. Compare to other similar transcievers, this chip is relatively cheap and provides good communicate quality. For example, comapre with zigbee, this chip has better range performance, but due to simplified compoments, nrf does not have complete rssi function but simple rpd function.



Although this chip lacks detailed RSSI (Received signal strength indicator), It can still determine if the strength of the signal reach the dedicate threshold or not. Depend on this, we can set the chip wake the stimulus device while the livestock gone too close to the virtual fence. By now, we are completely off computer and using arduino pro mini/ uno as our platform.The nrf chip would stay in low range mode to save power before it enter exclude area.​As soon as they enter exclude area, the receiver on the live stock would receive signals from the base transmitters(fences), release stimulus to drive the livestocks away and turned into long range mode in order to make sure they leave long enough.​The nrf chip would stay in low range mode to save power before it enter exclude area.​As soon as they enter exclude area, the receiver on the live stock would receive signals from the base transmitters(fences), release stimulus to drive the livestocks away and turned into long range mode in order to make sure they leave long enough.​ In order to make the connection between transmitter and MCU more stable, we decided to create our own PCB board. Dan take his time and make one prototype for us, and we printed it with help of Mr.Mike.



On the xbee part, they decided to take the inclusion approach, which means keep the livestock within one or several big circle. With higher cost in both budget and power consumption, this chip can provide far more fuinctionality compare to nrf24. This chip can transmit and control detailed to specific chips, by using the different physic address those chips have. The chip would stay in sleep mode for most of the time to save power, and wake up to send alarm while the live stocks reaches the edge, determine by the range related parameter RSSI.

The Software they use is called XCTU, which can control the chip via pc. They had move the reciever to the arduino platform but still working on the trasmitter side.

=Schedule= Specific Project Plan =Final Design=
 * 03 Sep 2018 to 10 Sep First instructor team meeting
 * 03 Sep 2018 to 17 Sep Clinet interview questions
 * 10 Sep 2018 to 22 Sep Information Gathering
 * 24 Sep 2018 to 08 Oct Snap shot presentation
 * 17 Sep 2018 to 22 Oct Concept Generation
 * 15 Oct 2018 to 22 Oct Modeling
 * 22 Oct 2018 to 12 Nov Trouble shooting
 * 22 Oct 2018 to 12 Nov Wikipage development(Draft)
 * 05 Nov 2018 to 26 Nov Concept Verification
 * 23 Nov 2018 to 10 Dec Design review Presentation
 * 23 Nov 2018 to 10 Dec Design review

=Validation=

=Team Members=

=Additional Documentation=

Project Schedule



Meeting Minutes



Presentations



Client Interview