Pawtrack, GPS cat tracker

We have had the pleasure of working with the chaps at Pawtrack.com on their industry leading GPS and GLONAS, WIFI & 4G enabled Cat tracking Collars. Pawtrack have been developing tracking collars for over 7 years now and one true home grown Kickstarter Success Stories now selling in over 170 countries worldwide.

Cat wearing the Pawtrack GPS Collar by Flynn Product Design

About the Project

Client
Pawtrack
Services
Product Design | Electronic Development | Design for Manufacture
Pawtrack Logo
GPS Collar

Challenge

We would like to say we remained as chilled as Monty here, delivering on this project, however truth be told, this was a massive challenge, one we relished! The Starting point for our involvement was in 2015, with an existing collar which was just too large for smaller Moggies. Pawtrack based their reputation on market leading accuracy due to the ability to track both GLONAS ( Russian ) and GPS ( USA ) satellites. Largely due to their tenacious Director Jeremy Price, are always looking to develop their technology and listen to their customer base, in some cases smaller cats didn’t get on so well with the original design so Jeremy was keen to work with us, to help us reduce the collar size in almost all dimensions, whilst increasing battery capacity and adding the feature of removable power module, to allow owners to replace the power pack whilst the other charges, always keeping tabs on Tabby.

Outcome

Final design was released for production in 2016 including a novel elastomeric encapsulation system making the most of the flexible PCB and curved hot swap-able battery pack. New features included extra battery endurance, IR Sensors to assist the accelerometer to be notified if your collar should come loose from the Cat, the Pawtrack Collar Automatically logs its known location before it should loose a view of the sky. There is even a built in WIFI enabled location technology to help you go and locate it on the ground. As is so common in design you have to trade off one thing for another. We have followed Guidelines set out by Animal Welfare Charities and Veterinarian Advisers on how tight a collar should be. Too loose however and the Cat will leave the collar at the first tight squeeze on its daily route.

We established a simple but effective quick release which can be customised for different weight of Cat, to release if there collar gets snagged. We experimented with novel ways to place the battery, inside outside the collar, curved batteries, segmented batteries etc, all using our novel and inventive ‘S’- Connector System. Follow up proposals explored the option of redesigning the PCB Layout and configuration of components internally. We spent months of Research and Development surrounding the hot topic in Wearable Technology- Encapsulation. There are a number of ways to skin a cat as they say, we explored complex Injection insert over moulding on variable pressure machines, looking at a far reaching variety of polymers and techniques, until we finally cracked it.

Final Thoughts

Pawtrack came out of a kickstarter campaign and ran into issues in the early years, with sub optimal sizing and product specification. Pawtrack are always moving forwards with an unmatched development pipeline in sector. Since our involvement we are pleased to see them go from strength to strength. As our MK1 offering, back in 2018 this product has seen an upgrade by us, which you can see here. Pawtrack is available in over 170 Countries globally – you can buy yours here http://pawtrack.com/shop/

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