I am shopping for "invisible fence" products for my dog and I'm only finding two types; the kind where I would have to dig a 2,000ft trench around my property and bury a wire, or the wireless kind where the transmitter is in the center and the dog can't leave a certain radius of it.
Option #1 - pain in the ass as I would have to bust up 2 driveways to lay the cable and contend with copious amounts of tree roots at the surface of the yard, and furthermore, if the dog bolts past the barrier wire, he's home free, and would actually receive a dose of "static correction" should he dare to return home after escaping.
Option #2 - limits me to the most inconvenient boundary shape ever - a circle. There's nowhere I could put the transmitter where he could have room to play, and still come inside the house, without accessing the neighbor's yard.
There was apparently a 3rd option which was for sale on Amazon, which was unreasonably expensive, got overwhelmingly terrible reviews, and then was pulled off the market.
It's something like this 3rd option which is what I would like to achieve. Leave out the part about zapping poor fido with electricity; that's against the tos and outside the scope of this post. I won't be designing the probes and associated torture circuitry, I'll use an off the shelf handheld remote dog trainer collar for that. All I want to design is the system for tracking my dog's exact position on my 3 acre property to within a couple inches of accuracy, inside or outside. Once I can do that, I can set up boundaries wherever I want them, and the canine torture device can do the rest.
So, any ideas how to do that? So far I've looked into Radio Direction Finding via zigbee, wifi, RFID, etc. and nothing seems accurate enough. Nor does GPS. If there's one thing I don't want, it's inconsistent performance. I don't want the dog not knowing exactly where the boundary is, and if it's going to be in the same place tomorrow.
The option #2 single-point wireless device seems to get consistently good reviews in that the boundary is consistent. Once the dog gets a certain distance from the transmitter, signal falls to a certain level, and the collar is activated. Repeatably. So if I could take that principle and integrate a few more transmitters, it seems that instead of using signal level to dumbly activate the collar, I could use signal level from 3 or 4 transmitters to triangulate a position, and based on that position, make an intelligent decision whether or not to activate the collar. but if it were that simple, there would be such a system already, one that doesn't take a thrashing from reviewers.
What other options are there?
Sonar? dog collar sends out a ping, receivers at corners of the property reply, dog collar calculates distance from each based on speeed of sound, calculates position?
Lasers or IR?
What else?
Option #1 - pain in the ass as I would have to bust up 2 driveways to lay the cable and contend with copious amounts of tree roots at the surface of the yard, and furthermore, if the dog bolts past the barrier wire, he's home free, and would actually receive a dose of "static correction" should he dare to return home after escaping.
Option #2 - limits me to the most inconvenient boundary shape ever - a circle. There's nowhere I could put the transmitter where he could have room to play, and still come inside the house, without accessing the neighbor's yard.
There was apparently a 3rd option which was for sale on Amazon, which was unreasonably expensive, got overwhelmingly terrible reviews, and then was pulled off the market.
It's something like this 3rd option which is what I would like to achieve. Leave out the part about zapping poor fido with electricity; that's against the tos and outside the scope of this post. I won't be designing the probes and associated torture circuitry, I'll use an off the shelf handheld remote dog trainer collar for that. All I want to design is the system for tracking my dog's exact position on my 3 acre property to within a couple inches of accuracy, inside or outside. Once I can do that, I can set up boundaries wherever I want them, and the canine torture device can do the rest.
So, any ideas how to do that? So far I've looked into Radio Direction Finding via zigbee, wifi, RFID, etc. and nothing seems accurate enough. Nor does GPS. If there's one thing I don't want, it's inconsistent performance. I don't want the dog not knowing exactly where the boundary is, and if it's going to be in the same place tomorrow.
The option #2 single-point wireless device seems to get consistently good reviews in that the boundary is consistent. Once the dog gets a certain distance from the transmitter, signal falls to a certain level, and the collar is activated. Repeatably. So if I could take that principle and integrate a few more transmitters, it seems that instead of using signal level to dumbly activate the collar, I could use signal level from 3 or 4 transmitters to triangulate a position, and based on that position, make an intelligent decision whether or not to activate the collar. but if it were that simple, there would be such a system already, one that doesn't take a thrashing from reviewers.
What other options are there?
Sonar? dog collar sends out a ping, receivers at corners of the property reply, dog collar calculates distance from each based on speeed of sound, calculates position?
Lasers or IR?
What else?