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 fening siystems in order to remove the high cost iron fences, providing possibilty to control livestocks outside the rancher with mbile devices.However, in some rancher away from city, it might be hard to recceive gps and internet signal. This would cause gps/internet based control system failing. In order to build a wireless control system in such area, we are going to build a non-gps/internet device to replace existed physical fences.

=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.

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.

The origin chips of our two groups are nRF24LE1 and CC2530. But we met sevral problems during using them.

First,The nRF24Le1 has an embedded MCU--8051 on the chip, which is unfamiliar to us. While ourselves dont have much experience on it, there's nearing zero support on the online community.This issuse also appears in the cc2530 group. As we found out that we cant finish E1 programming, we changed to nRF24L01 with arduino. The 01 is just the E1 without 8051 MCU. This chip can directly interfaced with arduino/rawsberry pi or other common mcus. Also,theres tons of example projects using these combo in the community. On the other hand ,the coding for arduino is much more simplified compared to 8051, and we neither external programmer nor HEX flashing stuff is needed.(The programmer we were using had some problem when flashing the HEX files into 51MCU). Arduino also provided us ready made functions libraries to use,saving our time to learn the exact layout of atmega mcu. What's more, Arduino is an integrated development platform, making things easier to communities with external devices.



At the same time, cc2530 groups find them none support for the modified development board they purchased, so they bought another set of standard board and everything goes well by now.They

The Next step :
 * to test the sleep and power-down function of the chips. If things goes well, the chip could wake up while receiving signal, while keeping sleep without signal. Otherwise we would use traditional duty circle to reduce the power consumption.(nRF24l01)
 * Test the pins on the bottom board to see if they can interfaced with external device, or we might to connect it to extraboard.(xbee)

=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