Renesas' Pet Tracker solution is a highly integrated, ultra-low power, connected pet tracker offering multiple radios for indoor and outdoor tracking, sensors for situational awareness, and a very efficient actuator driver to allow the pet owner to trigger a friendly attention indicator.
The connectivity portion of this device contains a multitude of radios to enable connectivity, including radios for locations where connectivity is limited or in situations where network subscription models are not desired. Connectivity is provided by an LTE Cat-M1 cellular IoT module, an ultra-low power Wi-Fi SoC which also contains the main MCU and a Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) SoC. The latter two are available as chip-down products or in an ultra-low power Wi-Fi + Bluetooth LE combo module for battery-powered IoT, that also contains all required RF components, an antenna if desired, and a QSPI Flash memory.
To accommodate customers and regions requiring higher levels of privacy and data security, our Wi-Fi solution is PSA Certified Level 1, making it easy for manufacturers to pass security-related thresholds and avoid exploitation of their customers.
The integrated Arm® Cortex®-M4F MCU is powerful enough and has sufficient memory resources to control the whole system while at the same time it is energy efficient to guarantee long battery life.
Our LTE Cat1-M radio, in combination with a GNSS receiver, allows tracking with no limit to e.g. private infrastructure access points while the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE connectivity are ideal for tracking pets on private properties with minimal power usage or in areas with no satellite signal reception such as buildings.
In the case of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth only connected scenarios, two AAA batteries would support multiple months to more than a year of operating time. Additionally, a pet tracker offering Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE in addition to LTE supports a wider variety of subscription models ranging from a continuous connection through LTE to a demand-based connection in case e.g. the local Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE connection is lost.
This Pet Tracker solution supports a variety of power supply schemes, ranging from primary cell batteries to the use of removable and rechargeable lithium batteries. For batteries exceeding 3.6V, a single ultra-low IQ DC/DC buck regulator is required only to efficiently generate a 3V rail for the SoCs and sensors.
Pet training can be supported through a low-power high-definition haptic driver which can be used in combination with a linear resonant actuator (LRA) or an eccentric rotating mass (ERM) actuator and delivers an industry-leading efficient ‘buzz’ per energy consumed to gain the pet’s attention when leaving a predefined zone or e.g. by triggering it through a virtual button on a mobile device.
