FindMyCat Is the Open Source Pet Tracker You've Been Waiting For

A lost pet is one of the most devastating situations a person can face and it can be very hard to deal with the real possibility that you might never find your missing companion. Most pet owners have seen advertisements for technological solutions like tracking collars, but the products never seem to live up to the claims. Either the tracking comes with significant limitations or the battery life is so poor that the device becomes impractical. But FindMyCat is a tracking collar that seems to offer everything we want and it is even open source.

FindMyCat works exactly like a pet owner would want it to. It is a lightweight collar that your feline friend can wear at all times. If they manage to escape from your home, the collar transmits its exact GPS location and you can view that in a smartphone app. There is also an indoor mode for sneaky kitties that like to hide. It uses UWB (Ultra WideBand) and Bluetooth, instead of GPS, to direct you to the cat's hiding spot. The app can also notify you if your cat leaves your home, so you can catch it before it makes its escape into the wilderness.

Other products have come along with similar claims, but FindMyCat seems capable of backing them up. The key to achieving that was the development of low-power electronics and a clever operating scheme. Under normal circumstances, FindMyCat remains in a deep sleep mode. Unless the cat leaves the house or you check its location, the collar draws very little power. But the "Smart Tether" wakes up the device when the collar moves too far away from the HomeStation. It then activates the GPS module and LTE adapter, so it can start sending location updates from anywhere with cell coverage.

This Smart Tether system means that the FindMyCat collar's battery can last about six months between charges. That's based on actual anticipated use and not inflated for marketing. In fact, it can last much longer if your cat never runs away and you don't need to track its position within your home.

FindMyCat isn't available yet as a commercial product. But because it is open source, you can build your own using the files published on GitHub. The only ongoing cost is the cell service, but that should be very affordable for the limited data this would require. And we suspect that FindMyCat would be easy to adapt to other animals, so dog and bunny owners should take notice, too.