Low power mesh dissertation project.

[Andrew Lancaster]

I am a electrical engineering student in my final year of study and am developing a product for my final year dissertation. 

The project idea is to help identify sickness in heard animals, each animal will have a small lightweight device attached to it in a collar, the device will log footsteps and transmit this data to the owner, the owner will then be able to see outliers that may not be moving as much and assess the situation. This product is intended as a tool to aid live stock owners in the health of their stock. 

The product will operate as follows. Lots of devices individually collecting data, each device is looking for a central hub device but if it cannot be found it will forward its data to the next nearest device. Once a device has located the central hub it will tell all other devices nearby it has been found, and then forward that message on to all other devices, then providing a rout for every device in the network to the central hub. Essentially creating a tree of links back to the hub.

I’m using some Arduino nano 33 IoTs, and I would like to use Bluetooth for the sake of energy consumption. However, 'Thread' looks like an apt solution to this, can you advice me on how this might be done and what equipment and software I might need to do this. 

Thank you.

 

[Sigurd Hellesvik]

Hi Andrew

When it comes to wireless technologies, range is key.
If the animals you want to track are indoors, Bluetooth Low Energy or Thread can be good protocols, as they have relatively short range.

However, if the animals are further apart, for example sheep in the field, they often will be too far apart for Bluetooth Low Energy or Thread to reach each other/ a hub.

For this use case, I would argue that LPWAN technologies would be better, such as LTE-M or NB-IoT.
Our nRF9160 has already been used for such cases, see our blog on Animal Tracking: Cellular IoT In The Field and Cellular IoT ear tag tracks health and location of farmed reindeer and other herding animals.

can you advice me on how this might be done and what equipment and software I might need to do this. 

Hardware:
The Arduino Nano 33 should be fine for Bluetooth Low Energy or Thread, as it is based on the nRF52840.
What else do you want to know when you ask about equipment?

Software:
Since it is an Arduino, you should be able to program the Nano 33 using Arduino Studio and its framework.
For this case, you may get limited help from this forum, as we do not specialize in Arduino development.
An alternative would be to use our nRF Connect SDK, which supports the Arduino Nano 33.
To get started with the nRF Connect SDK, see Getting Started and nRF Connect for VS Code.

Does this answer your questions?

Regards,
Sigurd Hellesvik