SafeRetrieve

Bringing Amazon Sidewalk to SkyShepherd's GPS Dog Fence

Focus integrated Amazon Sidewalk into SkyShepherd’s dog-fencing collar and led it through Amazon certification, extending connectivity far beyond the home gateway while maintaining full compatibility with the SkyLAN network.

SafeRetrieve's SkyShepherd is a patented GPS dog-fencing system that keeps pets contained without a buried wire loop. It needs only a lightweight collar, a home Wi-Fi gateway, and a mobile app. Its technology guides dogs with dynamic, escalating feedback: tone, vibration, and stimulation, based on their location, direction, and behavior, rather than a simple shock-on-crossing approach. To extend the system well beyond the gateway's coverage area and keep track of dogs that wander far from home, SafeRetrieve partnered with Focus to bring Amazon Sidewalk, Amazon's shared long-range wireless network, into the collar. Sidewalk gives the collar a fallback path to the internet through Amazon's mesh of Echo and Ring devices across North America.

The collar needed to support both Sidewalk and the original LoRa gateway, including in markets where Sidewalk isn’t available. Since Sidewalk’s stack doesn’t support radio sharing, this required a firmware-level solution.

GPS Tracking
Embedded Systems
IoT
Connectivity
Amazon Sidewalk
LoRa
Silicon Labs EFR32BG21
Semtech SX1262
FreeRTOS
Zephyr OS

What We Built

Focus ported the collar’s modem to a new hardware platform—Quectel’s KG100S, built around a Silicon Labs EFR32BG21 and Semtech SX1262 radio—and developed the firmware required to support Amazon Sidewalk.

The result is a dual-protocol collar that switches between SkyLAN and Sidewalk at runtime. SkyLAN remains the primary connection, while Sidewalk takes over as a fallback, extending connectivity across Amazon’s network of Echo and Ring devices. Getting there meant pushing beyond what the Sidewalk ecosystem supported.

Because the Sidewalk stack on this platform ran only on FreeRTOS, Focus built on Silicon Labs’ Simplicity SDK and developed a hardware abstraction layer for the LoRa radio. Focus also contributed official Zephyr support for the module to the Zephyr Project, opening the platform to a second RTOS for future development.

Finally, Focus led Amazon’s qualification and certification process end to end, from test execution and qualification firmware to device provisioning, documentation, sample preparation, and remote lab support. Amazon certified the product in July 2026, marking Focus’s second Amazon Sidewalk certification.

No items found.

Impact

The Sidewalk integration gives SkyShepherd's collar near-total connectivity across the US without relying on a home gateway, meaning that if a dog escapes its yard, the collar stays connected to the internet the entire time. This way, the owner always knows where the pet is, even beyond the gateway's signal range. The integration also gave SkyShepherd great visibility at multiple international IoT conferences and trade shows.

95% US Population Coverage

Connectivity over a network reaching roughly 95% of the US population, extending the collar's range from one gateway's range to nationwide

Sidewalk Certification

Amazon Sidewalk certification achieved, with Focus leading the process end to end

Dual Connectivity

Full compatibility with the SkyLAN gateway preserved, keeping the collar connected in remote areas and in markets Sidewalk has not yet reached

Bringing the integration to life required close coordination across Focus, SkyShepherd, and Amazon. From hardware and firmware alignment to certification and lab testing