Telemetry Weather Balloon

2009

A final group project in Joe Holt's Telemetry Class

The project was to attach an Arduino Duemilanove to a weather balloon that would take pictures, record temperature and pressure data as well as relay its GPS position back to us as it gained altitude.

Our Arduino was outfitted with an SD card shield and GPS receiver. Our Camera was a cheap Walmart digital camera made for kids, runs for around 25 bucks. We tore it apart and attached the shutter button to a Max395 chip, which when connected to our Arduino it would take a photo out of the bottom of the capsule every 2 minutes and record it to its own SD card.

The next part was the most difficult part. Transmitting the data back to us. This turned out to be my main job. I hacked a cell phone and soldered 2 wires to every button. Then connected those through a series of Max395 chips. This circuit when controlled by our Arduino would trigger whatever button we called for. So when we wanted to send data the Arduino would parse the GPS coordinates, transcribe it to flip the Max395 switches in the correct sequence to create a text message that would be sent to our class Twitter account with formatted GPS coordinates.

So to test that it all worked. We decided to tether it 500 or so feet above the ground and check all systems. Everything was working perfectly. So in our excitement we decided to let it go, on what happened to be a very winding day. Oops. We released it and received data for about 10 minutes and never heard from it again.

Devin Gaffney has a very detailed explanation of what we did if you would like to give it a try yourself and Ian Pearce has a video of our release

Class Twitter: TelemBalloon

Here our some pictures or our setup and the tethered test flight