The project GPS-Ortungssystem Cowfinder was realized as a graduation project during the 5th form of the HTL Braunau, a technical secondary school. Mountain farmers who want to drive their cows down from alpine pastures in the fall often face the problem of first having to find their cows. The Cowfinder enables users to visually locate GPS modules. Here only the position of the lead cow is needed to locate the entire herd. For this purpose, we developed a special belt, which can be hung around the lead cow, to hold the device. It contains the necessary energy supply, a GPS and GSM module with the required antennas and control board. The data generated by the GPS finder is processed by a microcontroller and transmitted to the GSM module. This sends the data via a mobile phone network to a central GSM module, which is linked via the serial interface with a server PC in our school, the HTL Braunau. On the server, a Windows application is running in the background that receives and processes the incoming GPS data from the serial interface and stores the significant data in a databank.

Visual mapping – i.e. locating positions and routes on a map – can occur via a webpage, mobile phone or Pocket PC. To do so, client applications were implemented specifically for mobile phones and Pocket PCs.