TALES FROM MAKE: BLOG ^{Nerds in Space} _{By Bre Pettis}

Makezine.com’s Weekend Projects shoots for the stratosphere.

FIVE SNAPS UP: Four cameras point outward to capture a 180° panoramic image from space. Using the MAKE Controller, they take a picture every 7 seconds. A fifth, hacked CVS camera on the bottom gets the first 20 minutes of flight on video.

Every week I publish a Weekend Projects

video that teaches you how to make something. Sometimes it’s a straightforward project like how to make a workbench, and sometimes it’s an ambitious collaborative project like my recent near-space balloon project code-named AHAB — A High Altitude Balloon.

For this podcast I needed help, and my friends at the Public N3rd Area (PNA) workshop in South Seattle stepped up to hatch a plan. The idea was to send a weather balloon and its payload up higher than airplanes can fly, to take pictures where the sky is black and you can see the curvature of the Earth. Near-space weather balloon flights have been done before, but we had some ideas to make this flight special.

To take a super-wide panorama, we packed in 4 cameras and a MAKE Controller to fire them off every 7 seconds. We added a hacked CVS video camera and pointed it downward to get the first 20 minutes of the ascent on video.

We built two different tracking systems. The first was a standard beacon that used a ham radio, GPS receiver, and Tiny Trak position encoder to broadcast location data to local repeaters and then onto the internet. Our backup system was an inexpensive cellphone loaded with Mologogo software,

which beacons GPS data over the cell network. Some clever programming made all of this available for the world to watch live on Google Earth.

Using a free wiki at balloon.pbwiki.com made collaborating on the project easy. Each person was responsible for researching and building a component for the launch, and we aggregated all the intelligence we had onto the wiki. Without the wiki, this project would have been a nightmare to organize. And it now stands as a document for anyone else to follow in our footsteps and recreate the project.

Our first attempt to fly the balloon, on March 3, was averted due to weather. We got out to Coulee City and found snow and dense fog. The FAA requires at least 50% clear skies, and we couldn’t even see 40 feet. We settled on a tethered test and sent the payload up 150 feet. All systems checked out, and we learned a lot about how to make it better. When we got back, we made a number of improvements.

On April 7, we returned to eastern Washington, and a month made all the difference. Temperatures were in the 70s and skies were clear; we were all set for takeoff. We were in constant contact with the FAA and local airports to let them know what we were up to, so they could keep airplanes out of the neighborhood of our launch.

Photography by Bre Pettis

190 Make: Volume 10