Building a cellular tracker: Part1 – Overall requirements and considerations

As described earlier, i want to create a cellular tracker – below you find my core-requirements.

The idea is to deploy these trackers to places far out and in the wild, on trees, under waterfalls or even in a drift bottle, swimming down a river. So a couple of things are obvious:

• Stability: The device has to run stable, rock-solid super-stable on its own for a long time.
• Power: It has to run as long as possible on batteries – ideally forever, with a combination of rechargeable batteries and a solar panel.
• Case: It should be definitely water-resistant, able to handle very low temperature and a hot summerday at full sunshine and the case should not break too easily
• Programming: I am not an embedded programmer, i am not even a programmer at all – therefore i need a device that can fulfil the requirements and be programmed easily nevertheless
• Interfaces: It should be easy to connect as many sensors as possible through the different standards that are available
• Price: as cheap as possible
• Connectivity: clearly, it needs an internet connection (well, there are examples of using SMS/Text-Messages to transfer data as well, but this is beyond my capabilities) – but it does not have to be 4G or 3G as the amount of data will be very limited. In fact a 2G GPRS connection would be enough.
• GPS: in some cases i will need also GPS-Data – it would be great if the tracker could easily tell it’s current position as well

First Test-Sensor deployed in the wild.