Smart Collar

RTK accuracy of 1–3 cm is achievable when the base station has a clear sky view and the collar is within LoRa range to receive differential corrections. When the correction link is unavailable — say, on the far edge of a large property before the mesh relay reaches the base — the receiver falls back to standard GNSS (~2.5 m), still accurate enough for field-level monitoring. Multi-constellation support (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo) improves first-fix time and maintains accuracy under partial sky cover from trees or hills. Position updates are configurable from 1 Hz real-time tracking down to once per minute for maximum battery life — typical livestock monitoring runs at a 10-second interval. Historical position tracks are logged at the base station, allowing after-the-fact review of where every animal was at any point in time.

LoRa's spread-spectrum modulation gives it unusually long range at very low transmit power — a key constraint for battery-powered collars that may go weeks between charges. Sleep between transmissions keeps average radio current draw under 1 mA, meaning the battery is dominated by the MCU and GPS receiver, not the radio. The radio is fully bi-directional: collars transmit telemetry uplink and receive commands downlink. This is what makes remote buzzer activation, vibration cues, and electronic stimulation all work reliably at field range, including through the mesh relay path when an animal is beyond direct base-station reach.

The practical effect of the mesh is that effective coverage scales with herd size, not with infrastructure. A 50-head herd grazing across a large property forms a dense radio lattice — even animals clustered in a far corner are rarely more than one or two hops from another animal that can hear the base. Commands travel the same path in reverse: a buzzer activation sent from Auxil reaches the base station over the internet, is broadcast over LoRa, and relayed hop-by-hop through the herd until it reaches the target collar. Redundant routing means multiple paths are always available — if one relay animal moves out of range, another takes over automatically without any intervention.

Audio classification happens entirely on the collar's embedded processor. Raw audio is never stored or transmitted — only the label (e.g. "distress", "estrus", "normal") and a confidence score leave the device. This keeps LoRa bandwidth usage negligible and eliminates any privacy concern. Detected states include: distress vocalisations (bellowing, screaming, repeated distress calls — immediate alert); illness indicators (laboured breathing, coughing, abnormal rumination); estrus and mating activity (vocal and movement patterns correlated with heat cycles); normal grazing (baseline state, animal is eating and moving normally); resting (low activity, correlated with GPS stillness to distinguish rest from injury); and predator alert (panic vocalisations from multiple animals simultaneously, triggering a herd-wide alert). Models can be retrained per species and farm environment.

Vibration is the first and gentlest output on the collar. In training contexts it functions as a conditioned cue — an animal that has been taught to associate a particular vibration pattern with a recall command can be reliably redirected from hundreds of metres away with no stress. In virtual fence mode, vibration fires first when the animal approaches a geofence boundary; only if the animal keeps moving toward the line does the system escalate to stimulation. This graduated response means most boundary crossings are stopped at the vibration stage with no correction needed. Pulse pattern, duration, and intensity are all remotely configurable per animal from Auxil, so working dogs, cattle, and horses can each have an appropriate profile.

The stimulation system works identically to established commercial livestock training collars, delivering a brief, mild correction that is uncomfortable but not harmful. Eight discrete intensity levels allow the operator to set the minimum effective level for each individual animal — a large bull typically requires a higher level than a dog to feel the same sensation, and the system accommodates that. In virtual fence mode, the escalation sequence is: approach boundary → vibration warning → continued movement → stimulation → animal retreats → system resets. In practice this trains animals to respect the virtual boundary without a physical fence after only a few correction events. Commands can also be sent manually to one animal, a named group, or the entire herd simultaneously from Auxil's live map.

The buzzer solves the problem GPS alone cannot: finding an animal that is accurately located on a map but is physically hidden behind a hill, in a creek bed, in dense scrub, or inside a building. The GPS tells you the animal is within 10 metres — the buzzer tells you which direction. It emits a distinctive 3-beep pattern repeated every few seconds, recognisable and distinguishable from ambient farm noise. Lost Animal Mode can be triggered manually from Auxil's live map, or fires automatically when a collar has been stationary beyond a configurable threshold (e.g. no movement for 6 hours during daytime — a strong indicator the animal is down). The buzzer silences automatically once the collar reconnects to the mesh or after a configurable timeout, avoiding unnecessary disturbance to the rest of the herd.

Battery life is dominated by the GPS receiver, which draws significantly more current than the MCU or LoRa radio during acquisition. The firmware uses an aggressive duty cycle: GPS acquires a fix, the position is transmitted, and the system sleeps until the next scheduled update. At a 10-second update rate the collar is active for only a small fraction of wall-clock time, while still providing smooth tracks in Auxil. At a 1-minute update rate battery life extends dramatically — sufficient for large-property mustering checks where real-time tracking is not required. Battery level is included in every telemetry frame, so a single glance at the Auxil herd map shows every collar's remaining charge without walking the paddock. Low-battery alerts fire automatically before any animal goes dark.