Hardware
Our main hardware deliverable was a small, implantable snake tracker PCB. While originally intended to be 10x40mm, the PCB ended up being 65x22mm when we realized we would have to assemble the PCB by hand. The PCB layout file is easily modifiable to shrink the tracker, however. We sourced parts for this device that met constraints for size (10x40mm) and power (8 months battery life) in addition to designing a PCB layout, and then manufactured and assembled the PCB. While we intended to test the tracker’s functionality, we unfortunately weren’t able to program PCB, and ran out of time to amend our mistake. Our second hardware deliverable was a base station, which we carried over from last year’s group and modified to fit our needs.
Software
From a software perspective, our main goal was to write a communication protocol for the microcontroller that could command the GPS unit, along with sending temperature, location, and battery data. Another goal of ours was to write a communication protocol for the base station that could receive and store data from the trackers. Our protocol ended up being able to receive and store data from the trackers, but needs some debugging to solve an issue with sending data, as detailed in Section 4.3. At the end of the semester, we intended to create a web-based front end user interface (UI) that would allow for remote collection of data, but we ran into a number of issues with the PCB that we had to prioritize over this front end UI.