GPS Weather Balloon
This was a group-directed final project for a class called Telemetry taught by Joe Holt. Here is a brief explanation of the project:
The goal of this project was to design something, using Arduino, that would be attached to a weather balloon and that, when let go, would somehow transmit its GPS coordinates so that we could retrieve it. We also decided we wanted it to take pictures as well as record temperature and pressure data (making retrieval all the more rewarding). Our computer was an Arduino Duemilanove equipped with an SD card shield and GPS reader. Temperature and pressure sensors hooked directly into the Arduino and data was written from them to the SD card at a constant interval. Through a Max395 chip, we hooked the Arduino to the "take picture" button of a cheapo Disney digital camera that would write to its own SD card. Photos were taken out of the bottom of the capsule every 2 minutes. The most difficult part was the data transmission. We took a cheapo cell phone and soldered wires to every button (super tedious). Then through a series of Max395 chips, we hooked these buttons to the Arduino. The Arduino would parse the GPS data and spit the correct sequence of button-presses that would make the phone text GoogleMaps-formatted GPS coordinates to a Twitter account, which all members of the group subscribed to.
A pre-flight test showed that everything was working great: taking pictures, reading data, sending GPS texts. We then decided to let it go from Bennington. It was a windy day. We assume the cell phone lost service since it stopped sending texts after about 10 minutes of flight. We were expecting this, however we were hoping it would land somewhere with service and resume texting. It did not do this, and we never heard from it again.
There is a lot I'm leaving out.
Devin takes credit for most of the code. He wrote up a detailed instructions page on his site.
Twitter page: telemBalloon
Many more images here: http://cs0.bennington.edu/code/telemetry/
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