Having caught up on my blog reading, I realized that we haven't posted in a month. Just wanted to give any readers of this blog a heads-up that we *probably* won't be launching in the near future. I haven't run any of the weather models myself (Daniel's been doing that, while I've been working on some basic air-density models and temperature measurement devices), but the winter winds in NC are likely to carry our balloon far out to sea.
On the temperature front, I ordered some iButtons to log the temperature and humidity of the balloon box, just because we can. I ordered the Thermochron (tempearture only) and Hygrochron (temperature and relative humidity) from iButtonlink. You can learn some neat stuff about the 1-Wire protocol here.
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2 comments:
Okay, I finally got around to following Michelle's advice and checking this here blog out. Pretty cool idea.
Although, I don't think you need to bother with all that fancy-pants GPS stuff. Just tie 20 miles of string to the balloon, then you can pull it back towards you as it's descending.
As a bonus, you could use 20 miles of coax cable (shouldn't be too expensive or heavy to lift, I would think) and send the pictures back directly via laptop/webcam, rather than having to wait for them to download.
Check out the success of Wright State University near Dayton, Ohio (http://www.cs.wright.edu/balloon/). We use a timer circuit from Velleman attached to a digital camera, a new system with near real time photo transmission using 900MHz industrial radios and a board computer to transmit between balloon and ground and a altitude switched three camera video system with a compact dvr. We use our own flight prediction program (Excel workbook) which feeds Google Earth .kml files and creates a fax for notifying the FAA of flight details.
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