Balloons!
I don't know why I feel like that always should have an exclamantion point. :-)
I read a lot of Hacker News lately. There's a lot of interesting posts on obscure things, interesting projects, political discussions and of course programming. A recent post that caught my eye linked to this high altitude (balloon project)[http://leobodnar.com/balloons/]. That guy is launching home made balloons that travel around the earth and stay aloft for months! That nerd sniped me for an entire afternoon. Below is the sum total of my research, if time and money allow (both scarce commodities for dad of 5 kiddos) I will pursue this further.
Current News
2018-12-26: Researching about tracking. Next steps are getting an SDR of some kind to experiment with receiving APRS tracking signals. With that alone I think I can track weather satelites and the ISS.
Extended Goals
- Goal 1: Recovery!
- Goal 2: Extended Flight time
- Long Term Goals:
- Interesting photography: Space! Antarctica!
- Data Center in the (literal) clouds.
Notes
Payloads:
- GPS->Cellular Text messages of location
- Low power radio
- Camera
- Science?!
Balloon sources:
Regulations:
Payload:
Sites:
- Poor Man's Space Program
- A club in NY
- Awesome balloon flights!
- Balloon Challenge
- Track Soar APRS
- PicoBalloons!
- PicoSpace
Costs:
Cost breakdown for all off the shelf components ~$700, this includes a nice camera, so I take this as an upper bound. Cost breakdown
Ballpark He costs: ~$1/ft3
Path Predictions:
Habhub path prediction software Hmmmm.... Using all the defaults and stuff it's predicting landing like 50-100km from the launch point. At first I was thinking The Dalles, but there's a lot of rugged country out there. Could make recovery interesting. Ah, Bend/Redmond area is a much better choice. So long as we have a bit of a southerly wind and we stay out of the Ochocos.