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Build Your Own Weather Balloon

Posted by michael on from the if-it's-wet,-it's-raining dept.

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."

5 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Re:other options to a weather ballon by adamruck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    no seriously... why would you want to undertake a project like this? I highly dought its for the weather aspect of the project. More likely, I think the builder created the whole project just as a large experiment(as he said several times in the article), and this sort of thing I can relate to and encourage.

    So lets think, if I was going to create a large complicated experiment, that involves fairly delacate equipment, would I want to have it floating nearly 80,000 feet in the sky? Thereby greatly increasing the chances of not getting the equipment back in one peice?

    Now if it was up to me, I would choose an experiment that wasn't so prone to breaking things(or landing things on the middle of a freeway). For example I would mod my car with some sterio/radio/computer equipment... or set up a large wireless network in my neighborhood... or something to that effect.

    Just becuase I made the first post doesn't mean that im a troll...

    --
    Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
  2. Re:alert level: Orange by JustAnOtherCodeSerf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You've just got to be kidding me.
    When sending up weather balloons, flying model airplanes/rockets, making robots or building home computers in your garage are cause for suspicion, then perhaps it's time to re-evaluate what a "free society" is. Hrm, maybe the Canadian winter is worth it... wait, Mexico's warm!

    Now shut up and hand over that those Lego Mindstorms!

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    -=sig=-
  3. What do you get when you... by chaeron · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ...combine a Radio Shack R/C Truck, onboard embedded java processor, GPS, wireless, XML, SOAP, Linux, J2EE, open source and a bunch of other stuff?

    The Mobile GPS Demonstration Platform project, which has even more geek coolosity than weather balloons. ;-)

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    .....Andrzej

    Chaeron Corporation
  4. In defense of dupes by Leeji · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've never really understood how so many dupes show up on Slashdot. Until now.

    I stumbled on this site when I was trying to figure out how many solder points would go into a home-made modem for a bbs. I thought it was cool, and didn't recognize it as a dupe even though I read /. The page-views were in the low hundreds, so I felt safe that it hadn't seen much traffic. So I submitted it.

    Feel free to troll in response to this, because I won't reply to them anyways. But for those with an open mind, you might like to know one way a dupe can legitimately happen.

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    It all goes downhill from first post ...
  5. Re:Other amateur balloons by rnd() · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hams have also frequently used these balloons for lifting massive quantities of wire for 160M antenna farms.

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    Amazing magic tricks