Weather balloon found!!

Some may recall, a while ago I was playing with releasing weather balloons equipped with a GPS, radio and 35mm camera, all controlled by a picaxe 18X. I launched a balloon in March this year, and another in late May. The March balloon (balloon 1) was lost in action, while the May balloon (balloon 2) was safely recovered the same day that it was launched.

You may be interested to hear that balloon 1 is now safely in my hands, after a caretaker found the payload, and dropped it off to his local police station. (last Wednesday)

Fortunately, 6 months sitting in the elements did not do any damage to the film cartridge in the camera, and all photos were developed!! The picaxe still works too!!

All updated details and photos are in the balloon 1 section here:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~philpawlowski/

Excellent! Absolutely fantastic! Can't wait for your Nov 05 outcome: GOOD LUCK!!!!

ylp88

Tremendous Well done. Great pictures.

What happens if the payload lands in a populated area?

Suggest you- ahem- add your name & address to the next balloon payload, along with even a small reward offer ? This was done back in the 50s by Met service here in NZ & I still recall "Ten shillings reward if dropped at the nearest PO" lettering on one I found. Naturally I found the elctronics MUCH more exciting that ten bob (about $20 now).
Consider adding a small solar PV to run a 433MHz beacon & flashing white LED too. I've an article in Nov. "SiChip" that may help. Stan

ylp88 - Thanks!

Rickharris - What happens? Your guess is as good as mine!! May be a few red faces (or worse) if it ended up on a highway. Statistically not at all likely tho, as winds generally push it hundreds of Km North East of Melbourne into unpopulated hilly terrain around the alpine region. The photos were taken only within the first half hour of lift off. The camera then ran out of film. Total flight time would have been over 2 or 3 hours, so it would have risen much higher and further before popping. It is all Civil Air Safety Authority approved of course.

Stan - Yes, in our haste, we neglected to add my contact details. This was rectified for the second balloon. It's amazing how easy it is to forget important things like that. During the launch of the second balloon, I almost forgot to put the film in the camera!!! What a fool I would have been if I had forgotten that!

The next one will have a UHF radio transmitting APRS through a tiny trak from byonics.com, as well as a fox hunting beacon. I am giving the solar PV idea plenty of thought. Currently the lithium ion cells can power the beacon for two weeks, so it may not be necessary for any other improvements on this, but your original google groups post on the weight of the PV cells opened my eyes as to how well they compare, weight for weight, to lithium cells.

Can't recall if I mentioned it earlier, but consider the new flexible metal foil based PVs -Copper Indium Gallium diSelenide (CIGS)- that weigh only a few grams. These Daystar(?) units are akin to the solar garden lamp ones in output (~2V @ 30mA) BUT are an order of magnitude lighter. They look like a slice of thin plastic -well at least my sample one did until a puff of wind blew it away outside! I've yet to find it...

Still at the &quot;boring old&quot; flexible amorphous Si stage, how does 300mA @ 1.5V &amp; just 23grams sound? Uni-solar versions are near bullet proof, but more like A$40 - $400, although great difused light output too. Check=&gt; http://www.pluggingintothesun.org.uk/cell.htm <A href='http://www.pluggingintothesun.org.uk/cell.htm ' Target=_Blank>External Web Link</a>

Really excellent pictures - something I'd like to do too !

Thanks very much Jeremy. The next goal will be to take photos at over 60000 feet- even approaching 100000 feet altitude. This has some challenges in its own as I hear that normal 35mm film does not work too well at sub -40 degree temperatures.

My aim is to get something like the image at the bottom of this page:

http://www.jpaerospace.com/pongsat/away25.html

That would be a truly sensational achievement for me. This altitude is called &quot;near space&quot; for obvious reasons.

there are one-use digital cameras getting to the market perhaps this would be better than film??

Really? Where and how much??

I figured that a 35mm film camera would give me similar resolution to a 2 mega pixel digital cam. But if something can be done digitally and lighter, that would be better.

I wasn't going to risk a regular digital camera getting lost. I am working on a tight budget.

This is a particularly nice one-use digital video camera which has been hacked. Just $20 USD !!!

Why do Americans get all the nice toys, and why don't I know any Americans who'll send me one for my birthday ? :-(

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/08/how_to_cvs_vide_1.html
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/21484537_c1d8704732_o.png

Nice find. I was toying around with getting one of these:

http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=QC3230&amp;CATID=&amp;keywords=digital+video&amp;SPECIAL=&amp;form=KEYWORD&amp;ProdCodeOnly=&amp;Keyword1=&amp;Keyword2=&amp;pageNumber=&amp;priceMin=&amp;priceMax=&amp;SUBCATID=

But still too expensive. And a little heavy, so the CSV one would be just the ticket.

I had a look at that guy's video clips, and I can only play one of them. The others show a general error fault. But from the one clip that I can play, I can safely say that it will work for the intention that I have. And after shipping to Oz, it would still only be about $50 or so.

Hi all,
check out ebay (uk) and search radiosonde as there are some dirt cheap units that may be of interest (the guy even has the baloons). Maybe someone clever could decode the gps/data signals from the units using a picaxe ?. Hope this is of some use

A link from the auctions states that the GPS data is not decoded onboard, so no NMEA data can be received from the GPS. This would be quite an obstacle and would make decoding any useable position fix quite hard to do. :-(

http://www.frars.org.uk/cgi-bin/render.pl?pageid=1257

Looks like Australia is not left out on the disposable camcorder scene. Check out

http://www.roamio.com.au/

64Mb storage, as compared to CVS' 128Mb, so half the video capacity, but still a reasonable AU$36 in my local chemist. This includes the prints and DVD processing. Now to find a hack for this camera similar to the hack found for the CVS camera.

Worthy of a silicon chip article Stan?

It's effectively &quot;rent a camera&quot; of course, &amp; at A$36 hence a questionable purchase given that even many cell phones offer similar video now! Users want to get to grips on their PC with pix of course. Assorted hacks abound for similar still versions, but with new still digitals now almost being given away used offerings tempt. (I recently bought a 3yo. 2MPx Olympus for A$50!)

Am presently wrestling with 433MHz ISM/LPID modules for Dec/Jan SiCh, &amp; have even dreamed up a range extending data repeater.
Stan

Oh my Goodness. Thats extremely interesting. Well done for actually even trying it. I'm kind of speechless actually.

Hey Haxby. Just an idea, but you could hook an old mobile phone up to a switch that triggered when the balloon crashed which than sent you a text message to inform you it was down and then simnply ring the mobile phone in the balloon and wait for someone to eventually answer phone to find out where it has ended up. You could use your phone number as a screen saver on phone maybe? Wouldn't even be that hard nor expensive to do either.

Or have you thought about trying to steer the balloon through SMS. That would be cool.

A couple of matchbox seats inside and a couple of worms. You could be famous. Newspaper headlines the next day &quot;Worms found in Air Balloon on Moon&quot;. ????????? Ok, I'm kidding. But the whole SMS idea would be cool. I was thinking that you could monitor other things like battery power etc so when getting low it sends you a text message. You could monitor all types of things this way.
Just some ideas anyway. Thanks for putting the pics on the net for us to see.

Tezarm - Unfortunately, using a mobile phone is not the best way to do it. The mobile phone network only operates on the ground. The antenna stations are tilted downwards and are quite directional.

With balloon 1, after only rising a few hundred meters, I was no longer able to contact the mobile phone. The next one will use CB radio.

Also because the balloons drift for hundreds of km, it is unlikely that they end up in a mobile phone coverage area once they land. While the mobile networks cover over 96% of the population, they do not cover anywhere near 96% of geographical Australia.

This whole exercise is one of chance. Even after launching two balloons, I still only give myself a 50% chance of recovering the next one in November. Literally everything has a chance of breaking. Coupled with unknown terrain, weather conditions, and the extreme sub -40 degree temperatures at higher atmosphere, as well as what could be described as my own primitive technology, the chances of failure are very high. But I think that it is the challenge that draws me to it. And two out of three aint bad.

Just in case a good westerly wind blows it across the Tasman here to NZ, perhaps you should add the following to help Kiwi balloon spotters-
1. Ultra bright white LED flashing ~every 30 secs
2. 433MHz ISM/LIPD beacon sending simple Morse ID *
3. Multiple name &amp; address tags !!!

A few cheapie solar garden lamp PVs &amp; a &quot;sleeping&quot; 08M should handle 1 &amp; 2, with a UV (&amp; water) proof pencil for 3. Stan

*EXTRA: Quite seriously consider the merits of a DS18B20 temp reading being encoded on the beacon, since this'll give simple altitude indication &amp; it's maybe easier to interface than a pressure sensor. Higher altitudes are of course colder &amp; a rapid temp increase will mean the balloon has popped, with payload now falling to warmer conditions etc. A steady temp may mean it's landed, with even then dramatic day/night variations relating to the impact environment (hot tin roof etc)

Edited by - Stan. Swan on 10/17/2005 7:32:04 AM

Haxby. Oh, I didn't realise half of that stuff you just said but believe your right with it all. Sorry it was a bad idea than.

Couldn't you arrange a transmitter beacon and triangulate the position from 3 seperate sites by tracking with directional aerials

Stan- I don't need a temp sensor because the GPS gives me altitude data. While some GPS units have a factory limit on altitude, I have a GPS module that escaped this inbuilt design flaw. In any case, using temp may be misleading as while the temperature decreases during ascent, after the balloon passes the troposphere into the tropopause, the temperature actually increases!!

Rickharris - Yes, the last balloon that was sent up had just a simple beacon onboard. The local beacon finding (fox hunting) club got involved and it was the only way we found the payload. There were about 7 cars hunting it, all equipped with external directional antennas. It was quite a day.

Note you only need two known measurements to &quot;triangulate&quot; the position.

RDF triumphs again- some talk of it being made an Olympic sport! And all the more reason for a 433MHz (temp) beacon-you'd get height info (including atmos. &quot;levels&quot; of course)&amp; if solar powered will run &quot;for ever&quot; awaiting RDF locating. GPS units are such power hogs that you'll maybe only get a few hours out of one aloft &amp; less grounded.
I may await a rare easterly zephyr &amp; send something your way at this rate (NZ-OZ) as proof of concept ! We often get Oz spiders &amp; bush fire smoke (&amp; even ashes) here - a mere 2000km away... Stan