LoRaJack - FAU Campus Golf Cart Fleet Tracker

This project designs and deploys a centralized GPS tracking system for the golf cart fleet at Florida Atlantic University's Boca Raton campus using LoRaWAN — a low-power, long-range wireless protocol purpose-built for IoT sensor networks. Each cart is equipped with a custom-built end node: a Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 V3 (ESP32-S3 + SX1262) paired with a u-blox NEO-6M GPS module, housed in an IP65-rated, white opaque weatherproof enclosure to survive Florida's heat and direct sun. Firmware — written in C++ using RadioLib, TinyGPS++, and U8g2 — follows a five-stage architecture: hardware initialization, GPS parsing, compact 13-byte binary payload encoding, LoRaWAN OTAA network join, and a low-power transmit loop. Latitude and longitude are encoded as signed 32-bit integers (scaled ×1,000,000) to preserve six decimal places of precision without floating-point overhead. Transmissions are received by FAU's existing on-campus LoRaWAN gateway and forwarded to a self-hosted ChirpStack v4 network server — keeping the entire system local and under direct control, with no reliance on third-party cloud services. A custom JavaScript codec in ChirpStack decodes each payload into structured JSON (cart ID, latitude, longitude, speed, heading, satellites, battery). Data then flows via MQTT into a Node-RED processing pipeline, is stored in InfluxDB, and is visualized in real time on a Grafana Geomap dashboard showing all cart positions across campus. Status: Hardware assembled and firmware architecture complete. Awaiting FAU gateway credentials for live OTAA network testing. Scaling across full cart fleet to follow.