WildDrone Locator

So, we intended to do this for quite a while, but we never found the time for it. The Return of the Square Inch Project finally lighted the fuse of the entire idea and got me going. There is no way to implement the entire network by October 1st 2018, but I'm happy if I can have the beacon done and working by then. It will be a good motivation to keep going.

Time is short, so I can't ask too much from the tiny beacon:

- first, it must be tiny;

- it must be as low power as possible. It will be fitted with a small rechargeable battery, as I also intend to use is as recovery beacon. I saw a lot of stray drones and RC models, so I know how useful it can be.

- a battery requires a charger and a protection circuit.

- I want to operate (and recharge) the beacon from the drone's power system, so a flexible power supply is required.

-  it will be equipped with a GNSS receiver. Obviously, one small enough to leave some place for other components.

- for configuration, I'd like to use the USB interface. So the low power MCU will connect to a PC with a micro-USB connector. It would be nice it it could also recharge by USB.

- The power supply must have an ultra-low quiescent current, as i intend to make use of the MCU's sleep capabilities instead of turning everything off with a cheap, fault-prone switch.

- some radio module to send the data to ground. I'll take my chances with LoRa, inspired by Andreas Spiess' success.

I haven't kept a log of my work, I'm not too good with documentation, so every log will be back-dated to when things actually happened.