LoRa based Tracking System for Sea Buoys

1. We are looking at having a very long range (25km) tracking system for sea based sensors mounted on buoys. 2. Use Case : There are certain sensors (on buoys) are released by mother ships for measurement in oil industry. Once these are released, they come onto the surface. It can take a day or two before the mother ship comes back to collect the buoys. The buoys are to be tracked by the mother ship for these one or two days so that it can effectively come to the location to collect the buoys. 3. Plan : A. The buoys are to have a GPS (preferably IRNSS ) receiver and transmit that data over LoRa. The GPS location will be sent only after the GPS accuracy reaches 20m or after 2 minutes (after reception of first GPS signal), whichever is earlier. The data will have four parts - Buoy's ID (customisable 3 digit numeric ID), GPS location, GPS accuracy and Battery life. B. The transmission has to be initiated only when an inbuilt accelerometer indicates that the buoys have not been moving much for the past 2 minutes. This is to avoid transmission when the buoys are still inside water. The antenna should be ejected outside the water level after this 2 minutes. The mechanism for ejection will be designed (and billed) separately. But the command alone for ejection should be designed as part of this project. C. The transmission has to be encrypted and the passcode customisable - basically you have to be able to put a password in the transmitter either through bluetooth or wifi or simply punching in some buttons. D. The data should be sent over LoRa every 5 seconds or 10 seconds or 30 seconds or 1 minute (customisable).The entire system should be very light weight (not more than 60 to 70g without battery). E. The location thus received from the buoys should be tracked on a computer/ Tablet (in the mother ship) on an offline map - This application should have the location bearing, location accuracy, Buoy ID and the offline map. But this feature of map is optional and a simple display of location bearing, location accuracy and Buoy ID will also be sufficient. F. There should be a LED light which will blink with low energy consumption so that the recovery ships can spot the buoys in night. Remember, these buoys are small in size and difficult to search for. G. Since the reception is over 15 km, there will be an intermediate LoRa module mounted on the top of the ships mast or a drone. Hence this intermediatory module will have to relay the data to another module at the Ship. So basically there are three nodes (Transmission Node on the Buoy, Intermediatory Node on a Drone/Mast and a reception node on the deck of the ship) - One suggestion for this is to use a mesh network as in Meshtastic Project or [login to view URL] project (any other protocol is also okay as far as it works). 4. The budget for this project is negotiable. But the complete electronic design, software codes to be provided to us. You should atleast provide us with three working prototypes (one transmitter, one intermediatory transmitter and one receiver). But, we shall also be able to manufacture all the components and modify the software codes at our end. Some suggested hardware (but you are free to choose other hardware): Processor - ESP32 LoRa - SX1262