We will be launching the balloon at 06:30 AM March 26th from Morro Bay, CA and estimate that the capsule will land north of Bakersfield.
Geoff, the kids and I will spend the night in Morro Bay and will drive to Calico immediately following the launch. Please contact me if you are interested in joining us for the launch or recovery.
I ran a GPS test today on the way to work! Now that we have the battery power figured out it is time to start some real world data collection and analysis 🙂
I powered the HAPPy computer for a solid 4.5 hours on the Energizer Lithium AA battery pack today – this is more than enough needed for the flight which should last just over 2.5 hours!
The computer (an Alix board with USB ports connected to GPS and cell phone) will SMS GPS co-ordinates to the recovery team as it descends which, along with Apple’s “Find My iPhone” app, will provide redundant methods for finding the capsule when it lands.
Shout out to John Reeve for introducing me to htop, a very cool top replacement.
I successfully powered the in-flight Alix computer today for 35 minutes with a 9V battery. Tomorrow I’ll build a 6 cell lithium AA battery pack which should give several hours of power – enough to last the entire flight 🙂
Thanks to Jay H. for the battery tips!
If you are interested in using the intervalometer and temperature logging lua script, you can download it from zinkwazi.com
I installed CHDK on the Canon G9 which will enable us to write an intervalometer script to take a high resolution RAW photo every 30 seconds for the duration of the flight 🙂
We are happy to announce that we have two new sponsors! World renowned photographer and author, Chris Orwig has donated an iPhone 3GS and Geoff’s brother Luke has contributed 30 feet of nylon that we will be using to connect the payload to the sounding balloon.
Thanks guys!
Some great photos and video from Google’s high altitude balloon project:
Happy is set to launch on March, 25 2011. I have my plane ticket and will be in California to add the final touches to the Happy project. It is set to launch in a yet to be determined area of the Mojave dessert in southern California.
Thanks,
HAPPY
We are testing a stripped down 3.5″ hard drive to see if it will 1) act as a good gyroscope and 2) run on an 18V battery pack for 2.5 hours…
We have been using an old ATX power supply to power the drive on a tether and a quick google introduced the “paperclip trick” where you short the only green pin with one of the adjacent brown ground (COM) wires to turn the PSU on… This means no more need to have an old motherboard connected to the PSU just to get power flowing. Pretty nifty!
