The idea for this Gizmo came up when me and my wife were Kite Surfing.... (everyone has to stay in shape and get out of that chair once in a while..)

At that time we were just starting out and basically were just falling and swimming rather than actually surfing.

So in one of those situations i went in with strong winds and lost my board, slowly i was watching it swim away while i was struggling with my Kite. That was a real bummer, i just bought that board the same day and lost it also the same day. And it wasn't cheap either. So after some walks down and up the beach i came up with a simple idea.

"Let's make a Gizmo that would be a cheap tracking solution with a small range, maybe 5km and make a small device with an LCD to search and find stuff like .... MY BOARD !!"

Firstly we had to find the right components for the job. And so we did.

1. An XBee Pro for the data transmission

2. An All in One GPS IC with an internal LNA - Something like a 20 Channel

3. Micro-miniature MN5010HS

4. A Low Power Micro controller - PIC16LF877A

5. And a Couple of REALLY small Li-Po Batteries

Now there would be 2 parts to this..

Transmitter

This should be as small as possible, enclosed in a Key fob enclosure, so that i could stick it anywhere like.. ON MY NEW BOARD, on my dog, or to see if my wife cheats on me  (the last one was a joke)

While designing this part i thought "Why not make this LOG the GPS as well" maybe i will loose the range or just want to log data. So we incorporated a small Data Flash IC into the design. Then another thought came to mind "What if it's dark and after long walks on the beach i can't see anything?" so we put a small buzzer and a High luminance LED on it. and here was the result.

Receiver

The receiver should also be small in size but not too small since there would be an LCD on it and a couple of navigation buttons to go through menus.

The right parts for this were already selected for the transmitter so we only had to find a nice monochrome LCD to go with it.
We found a nice LCD that did the trick. PLUS it had a nice Back light to go with it (for those walks in the dark) so the LCD we decided to use was the CFAX12864CP1-TFH.

OKAY. Now let's make an enclosure for this that would look nice and be as small as possible. So we decided to make a custom Enclosure for this with CNC machined ABS material. After some design work we made it happen:

After that it was all Downhill. We made the PCB's and ordered the Enclosures. We haven't assembled the PCB's yet but will do so soon. We have some parts that we still need to order. But after they come in we shall be testing it and USING it.

You can find all the Documentation about this project as well as schematics and Mechanical design in our Projects section.