A LoRa-based tracking system for fishery boats — built around a PCB we designed ourselves, for boats that spend most of their time well outside normal network coverage.
Fishery boats spend most of a trip well past the point where a mobile network reaches — which means the tracking systems most vessels rely on simply stop working once they're out far enough to actually need them. That gap was the brief: build something that keeps reporting a boat's position without depending on cellular infrastructure at all.
We built around LoRa — a radio protocol designed for exactly this trade-off: long range and low power, at the cost of bandwidth, which is fine when all you're sending is a position, not video. A transmitter unit on the boat streams location back to a base-station receiver on shore, over a link that doesn't care whether a cell tower is anywhere nearby. The board carrying it was ours — designed, laid out, and assembled by the team rather than bought off the shelf.
The tracking device is built around the LoLin NodeMCU V3, an ESP8266-based WiFi microcontroller that orchestrates all sensor data, LoRa radio communication, and GPS positioning.
The build was entered into the SLIOT tournament, hosted at the University of Moratuwa, where it placed 2nd runner-up in the university category. Coverage of the event and the product came from the University of Moratuwa and SLTMobitel.
This was the first time I took a project from a whiteboard idea through to working hardware, with a team depending on me to hold the schedule together — design, build, test, and present, on a competition clock rather than a semester one.
Photography — University of Moratuwa & SLTMobitel