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Thursday, August 11, 2011

Play-by-play of a high altitude balloon flight - Pictures from space for $150 - Hack a Day

Play-by-play of a high altitude balloon flight

posted Aug 9th 2011 12:01pm by Brian Benchoff
filed under: digital cameras hacks, misc hacks

[Greg Intermaggio] and [Shumit DasGupta] at Techsplosion launched a high altitude balloon last week that climbed to 90,000 feet above sea level somewhere over California. The play-by-play of the flight is one of the better stories we’ve seen on high altitude balloon builds.

The balloon, christened VGER-1, carried a SPOT satellite GPS messanger to send telemetry back to the ground. We’ve seen a few home brew balloon tracking devices, but [Greg] decided to use an off-the-shelf solution for the sake of simplicity. Like other balloons the VGER-1 carried a CanonPowershot camera with CHDK firmware.

The ground track of the balloon shows it being launched west of the San Francisco bay, going above the 60,000 foot limit of commercial GPS units about 15 miles South of Sacramento, and eventually landing just off Interstate 80 a few miles from Lake Tahoe. It’s great that the guys found an easy commercial solution to the tracking problem (that doesn’t risk a smart phone), but if we did this, we’d predict the balloon’s trajectory before launch.

[Greg] put up an album of some of the best pictures taken by his balloon. If you’re in the Bay Area this weekend, [Greg] and [Shumit] will be organizing a group launch of high-altitude balloons. Seems like a really great way to spend a Saturday if you ask us.

tagged: balloon, gps, high altitude balloon, near space

Go there...
http://hackaday.com/2011/08/09/play-by-play-of-a-high-altitude-balloon-flight/

VGER-1 Launch

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT2Kxl23GBQ&feature=player_embedded

Pictures from space for $150

posted Sep 13th 2009 12:35pm by Jakob Griffith
filed under: cellphones hacks, digital cameras hacks, gps hacks

prelaunch

Ever wanted to be able to launch a balloon into space, track its location via GPS, take some photographs of the curvature of the earth, and recover the balloon, all for the low low cost of $150? [Oliver Yeh] sent in his teams project, Icarus, which does just that. The group of MIT students found that they could use a weather balloon filled with helium to reach heights of around 20 miles above the earth; their particular balloon achieved 93,000 feet (17.5 miles). Then, utilizing only off the shelf components with no soldering, conjured up a GPS tracker using a Motorola i290 Prepaid Cellphone. They then used a Canon A470 loaded with the chdk open source firmware to take pictures. After seeing the results of their launch, the team hopes that this could rejuvenate interests in science and the arts.