Teardown of Tractive GPS Pet Tracker and Petrainer Shock Collar
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- Опубліковано 29 сер 2024
- Found a Tractive GPS Pet Tracker and Petrainer Shock Collar in the field. I'm not sure how long they were exposed to the elements. Here's a look inside with some information on the components! Petrainer Antenna board - SYN521R-1751 (wireless receiver), vibration motor, transformer, speaker. Tractive GPS: ublox: SARA-R412M (cellphone module), MXIC S204643 (memory), CIROCOMM (ceramic antenna), OPL1000 (WiFi BT), plus some other goodies (piezo speaker, WiFi/BT antenna). I contacted Tractive numerous times over 4-5 months and had no luck returning the item so I assume the owner (or pet) moved on and didn't need it (the tracker itself isn't much, most of the cost is in the monthly subscription).
You the man. Thanks for the thorough look inside
Glad to help and thanks for watching!
My tracktive just came back to life as I was watching this right now!
It knew what was coming haha:)
Cool devices for sure!
very instructive, thanks a lo for this video
Thanks for watching, hope it helped!
when I tried to open my tractive device (button not responsive, light and sound not working, was charging though) it heated up and then smoke started to come out and the housing melted.
seems that the battery exploded, I don't understand why.
It sounds like at some point you shorted the battery. If you were prying it open with a metal instrument it could have contacted the battery terminal and caused a short circuit, the battery started to discharge quickly and heated up. Also could be that prying it made the circuit board contact another metal component inside, once again it could have caused a battery short. Either that or you engaged the self-destruct mechanism! 🤣
i think that the black cilinder in the shock colar is not a capacitor but a tilt sensor.
Good point. I'm not sure as I don't have it anymore, but there should be a capacitor in there as well somewhere because it has to load up enough power to deliver a shock. Battery alone can't drain fast enough and at high enough voltage, so there is usually a capacitor and transformer coupled together to crank up the voltage and provide enough current to deliver a zap! Poor dog! 🤣
Hey, can you find out which connection on the charging input is negative and which one is positive please? I was watching but couldn't work out which is what..
I've lost my charger, but I know it will be possible to cut any USB charger and connect negative and positive to the device and plug in USB port 5v 1A
I don't want to risk destroying the battery cells by connecting to wrong prongs
Hi, sorry the unit has long been trashed so I don't have it any more. I tried to return it to the original owner by contacting Tractive numerous times, which they confirmed, but they never followed through with any further instructions so I told them I'm trashing it. Could be the original owner stopped paying the subscription and maybe didn't need the device anymore so they didn't respond. As far as figuring out the terminals, if you can non-destructively open your Tractive device you can check inside directly. Alternatively if you have a multimeter there may be a small residual charge on the internal cell and you may be able to sense that on the pins, so you know which is the "+" and which is the "-" terminal.
Thankyou for this reply, i didn't see until now @devhackmod
I would be grateful if those who know about these things would tell me how they work. Specifically I am wondering why I have to pay monthly for the tracking service, and whether it's possible to somehow hack this to switch to a mobile phone I have. This question may seem odd because I'm not even sure how to formulate it, I don't have the necessary understanding of the technology.
I am just looking at this and thinking that it communicates with local cell towers, in the same way a mobile phone does. If that is the case, and the company charges a subscription service, then it seems like it's using the same tech as a phone. As one can switch cell providers, I'm wondering if this could be messed with to accept a sim I purchase.
Again I apologise for the absolute ignorance of this question. I am only trying to understand how the tech works.
You are asking all the right questions! Yes it appears to be using a local cellular tower data connection, much like cars use for telematics services (On-Star, GPS tracking, etc). Ultimately somebody has to pay for the data carrier and so the company making the tracker needs to pass on that charge to the end-user. You will notice on the "uBlox" package there is an IMEI number which is a unique number identifying each mobile device. No matter what local carrier is used (and it may be hard-locked by Tractive based on region, I don't see a "SIM" or any way to change this), it requires a cell-tower to work. You can't just make it communicate with your phone (and even if you could use some BlueTooth feature, the range is way too short). This is something Tractive would have programmed into the devices and arranged contracts with carriers and costs for data services at the time they engineered this, or perhaps can change on their end, but the user has no way to modify anything.
@@devhackmod
I believe you have been very kind and charitable with your reply when dealing with someone who is obviously quite ignorant of these things.
To clarify...would someone be able to utilise the hardware and create their own little custom GPS tracker? Or is it somehow locked in a way that only Tractive can use it?
Again I apologise for what I assume are grossly ignorant questions.
You may have to dumb this down for a biologist (which is what I am).
Can i mod this device, so I don't need subscription?
It's highly unlikely. The device communicates with the local cellular network and has a built in IMEI likely registered to Tractive. The data is likely being sent to Tractive servers. Whatever carrier accepts the data is going to bill Tractive and they will bill you. So to hack it, you will need to change a lot of firmware hard-coded stuff. Not easy!
@@devhackmod Damn. But thanks for your response!
Perhaps I can sell it to someone. I'm looking for something smaller, and without sim.
@devhackmod Where would you insert sim in tractive. I didn't see anything for it
@@abhishekbhatia9853 I think the module must be using an eSIM (embededd SIM which is a small chip) instead of a physical sim card.
WHAT A WASTE OF TIME!!!!!
Tell me about it! Think of it like this... I wasted my time so that tons of UA-camrs would not have to suffer the same way. So really, I saved a lot of people time! 🙂
@@devhackmod u saved mine
The video helped my situation with my tracker.
Not at all, this is a very informative video for hardware crazy folks. Thanks @devhackmod