Tag Archives: Balloon

Mexican Highschoolers Launch 30 High Altitude Balloons

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No matter whether you call them “picosatellites” or “high altitude balloons” or “spaceblimps”, launching your own electronics package into the air, collecting some high-altitude photos and data, and then picking the thing back up is a lot of fun. It’s also educational and inspirational. We’re guessing that 264 students from 30 high schools in Aguascalientes Mexico have new background screens on their laptops today thanks to the CatSat program (translated here by robots, and there’s also a video to check out below).

The package on each balloon was roughly similar — consisting of an Arduino with a custom shield, a …read more

Continue reading Mexican Highschoolers Launch 30 High Altitude Balloons→

Mexican Highschoolers Launch 30 High Altitude Balloons

Posted on by

No matter whether you call them “picosatellites” or “high altitude balloons” or “spaceblimps”, launching your own electronics package into the air, collecting some high-altitude photos and data, and then picking the thing back up is a lot of fun. It’s also educational and inspirational. We’re guessing that 264 students from 30 high schools in Aguascalientes Mexico have new background screens on their laptops today thanks to the CatSat program (translated here by robots, and there’s also a video to check out below).

The package on each balloon was roughly similar — consisting of an Arduino with a custom shield, a …read more

Continue reading Mexican Highschoolers Launch 30 High Altitude Balloons→

New Record for Balloon: Duration Aloft

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High-altitude balloon flights have become somewhat of a known quantity these days. Although it’s still a fun project that’ll bring your hackerspace together on a complex challenge, after the first balloon or two, everyone starts to wonder”what next?”. Higher? Faster? Further? Cheaper? More science? There are a variety of different challenges out there.

A group of Stanford students just bagged a new record, longest time in flight, with their SSI-41 mission. In addition to flying from coast to coast, on a track that went waaaay up into Canadian airspace, they logged 79 hours of flight time.

The secret? Val-Bal. A …read more

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Maybe Your Next Robot Should Be a Cyclocrane

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At my university, we were all forced to take a class called Engineering 101. Weirdly, we could take it at any point in our careers at the school. So I put it off for more interesting classes until I was forced to take it in one of my final years. It was a mess of a class and never quite seemed to build up to a theme or a message. However, every third class or so they’d dredge up a veritable fossil from their ranks of graduates. These greybeards would sit at the front of the class and tell us …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A CPU For Balloons

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Launching a high altitude balloon requires a wide breadth of knowledge. To do it right, you obviously need to know electronics and programming to get temperature, pressure, and GPS data. You’ll have to research which cameras will take good pictures and are easily programmable. It’s cold up there, and that means you need some insulation to keep the batteries warm. If you ever want to find your payload, you’ll also need an amateur radio license.

There’s a lot of work that goes into launching high altitude balloons, and for his Hackaday Prize entry, [Jeremy] designed a simple embedded data recorder …read more

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Ham Antenna Rises to the Occasion

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There was a time when you could do what you wanted in your yard and hams could build giant antenna farms. These days, there are usually laws or deed restrictions that stop that from happening. Even if you can build an antenna, you might want to quickly put up something temporary in an emergency.

[Eric’s] solution? Suspend a wire from a weather balloon filled with helium from the local WalMart. The 8 foot balloon took two containers (18 cubic feet) of gas before it would rise sufficiently. Once you have a floating balloon, the rest of the concept is simple: …read more

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