In support of a more ambitious launch in the (hopefully near) future, I launched a weather balloon to ~99,000 ft 2 weeks ago. I had a blast and learned a ton from it. I thought I'd share the results with you.

http://hab.robotrising.org/post.html

Maybe next time put some gyroscopes in there.

+2

Or a disco ball.

I'll probably have something more constructive to say or more than likely ask, once I've had the chance to read through the whole site/page. This is something I've wanted to do for years.

Keep in mind that video was condensed from 2 hours to 30 minutes. A salient observation, nonetheless. And one to which I have given much thought.

Ideal would be 3 gyroscopes so that the moments of free fall also remain stable. However, space, weight, and power (which means more weight) constraints will rule out any active on-board stabilization measures. I may use a drogue chute of sorts to at least keep it oriented in one direction in regards to the local wind.

So very cool! I love these sorts of projects. Thanks for sharing!


I don't mean to pile on, but couldn't about 9 minutes of video of bugs crawling around in the grass be clipped out of that? Then you could slow down the actual ascent and show it in real time... It might make the spinning a little easier to watch, too.

Yep. Time and video editing skills aren't a commodity. I could have done much better. And will in 2 flights.

Launch 2 and successful recovery occurred 6 days ago. Launch 3 (final launch) will occur in a little over 12 hours.

You can follow along live at
Noisy live map - http://hab.robotrising.org/map.html
Live photo blog - http://hab.robotrising.org
(The above links will have their databases wiped before the launch.)

Less-noisy live map - http://aprs.fi/#!call=a%2FKF5PEP-1&timerange=3600

You can read about the previous launch(es) at http://robotrising.org/

And the conclusion to the project. I explain the stitching process, and cover some of the many hurdles I had to overcome. I also share a ton of imagery, including some cool videos.

http://robotrising.org/2013/01/operation-stratosphere-conclusion/

If you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to answer.

This was fun to read. Huge amount of work went into this! Have you corresponded with the sorts of people who use these sorts of balloons for scientific purposes? It might be interesting if you could pack a scientific payload of some sort on your platform (or, have your cameras hitch a ride on somebody else's platform).

It was a ton of work! Thanks for taking the time to read it all. It took an awful long time just to put that together.

I did have some sort of scientific platform on board. It was just a sensor pod I made that measured humidity, internal temp, external temp, and GPS data every 1200 milliseconds. But that's about as scientific as it got.

I am very loosely associated with a group that is trying to put a satellite into orbit from a balloon. That's about it, though.

Ouch! That viewer locks up and crashes safari on ipad.

Sweeeet.

Sorry. I don't have one, so couldn't test against it. It is non-functional, but non-crashing, on my Nexus 4, if that helps.

Okay, the 360 degree balloon bursting video is fucking spectacular. Awesome.

Awesome! Glad you liked it.

I think I made an error in my image dumping. If I did another pass I could probably clean the video up a bit. Basically, ffmpeg is a giant ball of mystical charms. If you specify -ss before the input parameter it will jump to the closest keyframe before the time you specified. If you specify -ss after the input parameter it will go frame by frame until it gets to the exact time you specified. And, supposedly, if you specify -ss both before and after it will jump to the closest keyframe, then walk to the time you specified.

I was specifying -ss before, so it's possible that each of the six frames dumped per global frame were off from each other a bit. I've had a go at specifying -ss before and after, but it doesn't seem to get me the time I asked for.

If I get motivated, I'll do another pass with -ss after the input. The only problem with -ss after is that it takes a long time to dump the frames. (Longer than usual)

And to think we all knew him before he was famous!