BAAPS is a cheap and good sheep positioning system utilizing open technologies

What does it do?

BAAPS shows you where your sheep are, without any fuss or vendor lock-in. It makes use of Home-Assistant, Chirpstack and LoRaWAN; setting you up for a full farm automation system. BAAPS seeks to bridge the technical gap for farmers wanting to build their own tracking system, by providing the building blocks which have led other farmers to success.

Why do I need this?

There are quite a few animal tracking solutions commercially available, and there are also many routes to building one yourself if you have the technical know-how. Commercially available options are generally locked-down, which prevents their integration in a larger farm automation system, and subject to recurring (often steep) fees for ongoing use.

BAAPS is open, easily adaptable and extensible; demands no recurring fees and cannot be taken away from you, the community.

What do I need to make this work?

- You need tracking devices, specifically ones using the open LoRaWAN communication protocol. A few examples: [1], [2], [3]
- You need a LoRaWAN gateway. Examples: [1], [2]
- You need to run an instance of Home-Assistant on a computer.
- You may need to run an instance of Chirpstack on a computer. Which components are required depends on whether your LoRaWAN gateway has support for running an embedded Chirpstack instance
- You need to run an mqtt broker, like Mosquitto. Following the Home-Assistant mqtt docs, the HA mqtt broker add-on is recommended
- Create one "input helper" in Home-Assistant called `report_interval_trackers`, and one called `tracking_history`
- Optionally connect your Home-Assistant instance and your smartphone to a mesh vpn like Tailscale, so you can use BAAPS when you're away from the (wifi) network where your computer (with HA, Chirpstack, etc) is connected