Build Your Own Weather Balloon

Leeji writes "Here is an interesting read about one geek's project to build and launch a weather balloon. The flight recorder is a small $200 Soekris Engineering computer running Bering Linux. It also uses a Garmin GPS, HAM packet radio, an automated Aiptek Pencam Trio digital camera, army surplus batteries, and lots of geek duct tape."

Comments

Re:dupe

[lyle_hanson]

I'm not one to jump all over the editors for posting dupes; I can sympathize with the amount of stuff they probably wade through. But over the last couple weeks, my sympathy is waning.

Could it be that hard to at least glance through each day's stories so you know when dupes come in? If you did, wouldn't a "build your own weather baloon" story stand out in your mind at all? If I'm missing something here, please point it out to me.

On the side of reason, if you see a dupe, big deal. So don't read it the second time. It's like deleting spam; no reason to get worked up over it.... except sometimes it gets friggin' ridiculous.

Waiting for Baloon 2.0

[anticypher]

So this geek pulled this off with a minimum of thought. I admire the fact he did it, and was able to recover the baloon. But really, if he had put a little more thought into this, he'd probably have a much better geek experiment. That's why its version 1.0

The first time he ever tried assembling the whole thing was sitting in a park the morning of the launch. He had never weighed the whole thing until then, and then just randomly filled the balloon until it "seemed right", but that only got him about 60% of the lift he wanted.

Aligator clips on batteries. Ugh. Plus a quick run home to solder up a permanent connection while his friends hung around the park. Some staging for the week before the flight would have eliminated lots of these little problems.

He didn't check his ham frequency to see if others were using it, and his QRM walked all over other amateurs in the area, and their chatter kept his unit from receiving commands. Bad ham, no cookie!

Obscure perl bugs. Wouldn't be a geek experiment without them.

Bubble wrap for electrical insulation. ZZZZzzzzaaaaapppp!!

Here's to hoping Balloon 2.0 makes it into slashback soon (or just another dupe from CT). With more hacked up sensors, better photos, and a flight track out past Kansas :-)

the AC