Aaron's High Altitude Balloon Launch

• by Emcee Grady
• July 9, 2012

Check out the tutorial from SparkFun engineer Aaron's HAB launch.

We've talked in the past about high altitude balloon launches done by SparkFun employees (namely Nate's launch documented here, here, and here). Today, we're going to talk about SparkFun Engineer Aaron's launch. This was his first try at a high altitude balloon launch, so it's a great place to start if you're thinking of doing your first HAB project.

These are the items he put in his payload - the numbers correspond to the picture above:

1. A foam cooler for the payload box.
2. Next is the radio tracking system. Notice the wheel antenna mounted to the bottom of the box. Aaron used an omni-directional wheel antenna with a good amount of gain in the vertical direction, pointing down, and a 1 Watt Xbee as the transmitting radio.
3. A Yagi antenna to receive the signals from the transmitter.
4. The flight computer (green board) consisted of a custom designed PCB from BatchPCB, an ATmega328 powered at 3.3V, an ADXL345 accelerometer (for orientation), an HMC5843 magnetometer (for heading), a BMP085 temperature and pressure sensor (for elevation), a Copernicus GPS module (for position and backup elevation), an OpenLog (to record anything Aaron didn't get on his radio), and a tri-color status LED. The computer, as well as the radio and camera, were all powered separately with single cell 2000mAh LiPo batteries. 
5. The blue camera at the very bottom of the picture had a LiPo battery hacked onto the power plug and the camera ran a CHDK intervalometer script, so it continually took pictures and video. 
6. The silver-ish cylinder in the middle of the picture is the radio reflector. The FAA requires you to use one, so that radar/airplanes can see your balloon.
7. This is the recovery parachute. 
8. And most importantly, in the center of the picture is the SPOT locator. This device sends position messages (unfortunately not altitude data) to a dedicated webpage every 10 minutes.

He stuffed all that into the cooler and sent it on up. He got some pretty cool results and definitely learned a lot. If you want to try your own high altitude balloon launch, you can check out Aaron's detailed write-up here. Safe flying!