LoRat Trap Monitor. Part 3 - PCB design

I have now created a prototype PCB design to hold the LoRa radio and the Arduino Mini.

The schematic is pretty straight-forward:



As is the resulting board which is about 34 x 65mm:





This should fit inside one of the candidates for a repurposed enclosure - an "Eclipse" mint tin.

Design files are available on Github.

I created some custom footprints for the LoRa module and the U.FL antenna socket and these are also available on Github.  The LoRa module is quite tricky and might be difficult to solder but we shall see.

I'm having prototypes made at both OshPark and PCBWay simply for comparison. The latter will turn out quite cheaply as long as a cheap shipping option is available.

LoRat - remote trap monitoring. Part 2 - a (brief) successful field test

A brief followup to part 1. I did a preliminary field test over the weekend in our back yard. Since I have not caught a rat for a while I adapted it for mouse trap simply by rubber banding a mouse trap to the rat trap. On Saturday night, while on vacation in Wanaka, I was pleased to get this email:





Then when I got back on Sunday evening I found there was indeed a mouse in the trap:




It rained a couple of times and there was some wind over the weekend but there were no false alarms, the sensor seems to be still in good order. So far it is proving reasonably robust and it was great to see it adaptable to different trap types. So I'll leave it out for another few days before trying to find a more remote site to test it on rats.

Work is still underway on the PCB and figuring out a smaller and cheaper enclosure.