Replies to This Discussion

ModeratorPermalink Reply by Gary Mortimer on May 2, 2012 at 11:47am

I fly a Cameron Z 400 is that enough stuff ;-)

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Permalink Reply by Earl on May 4, 2012 at 11:39am

Our 5/5/12 flight has been reschuled for 5/15/12.
All the equipment has not arrived yet.
Here is what we are flying this time.
APM2 with data recording.
433mhz 3D radios with 1 watt amplifier.
5watt ATV video TX on 439.25mhz
10 watt APRS system for live tracking on the Internet.
3 small video cameras up/down/side view with 16gb data recording cards
The APRS system will have a high altitude GPS unit on it.
900mhz 1watt XBee radio to send telemetry
3 5000 ma 11.7 volt lipo batteries.
Cut away thermal system to cut balloon from package controlled by XBee radio

You may view the flight via aprs.fi on the Internet starting at 8 am mountain time 5/15/12

Earl

More to come.

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Permalink Reply by Earl on May 4, 2012 at 5:27pm

N8TV

you can go to aprs.fi and see my trip home tonight

 

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Permalink Reply by Earl on May 8, 2012 at 8:28pm

We ordered some neat stuff for a balloon launch later this summer.

It is a 2.2 meter X8 flying wing !(big black one) Going to use it as a glider from 100,000 feet. Video,APRS tracking,APM2 for RTL.

Still in planning stage.

Earl

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Permalink Reply by Earl on May 15, 2012 at 1:43pm

I hope Mike Osborne can modify Mission planner to make sending commands to the APM2 easier. I suggest another tab next to the existing tabs for uplink commands to the APM.

A new window would open and have buttons to turn on/off the free adc0 to adc11 pins on the APM2. Other possibilities are readout boxes for the same. A choise to make a0-a11 analog or digital also.

Mike indicated this would require a change to the APM code. We need to get the APM coders and Mike on the MP together to make this happen.

I think this would benefit all as a lot of people would like to upload various things to the APM while airborne.

Sure hope we can get this to happen......

Earl

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Permalink Reply by Earl on May 26, 2012 at 12:45pm

Well the 5/15 flight was delayed again. New date is 5/29/12. We are pretty sure of this data.
We are testing the aprs locating hardware. The website is aprs.fi and the callsign is ke5vsh. We are testing all weekend so you should see it.

Launch is from the Walmart parking lot in Edgewood Nm at 8am. Watch the track in the inet.
Earl

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Permalink Reply by Earl on May 26, 2012 at 10:12pm

We also have the 7 foot wingspan x8 glider for a balloon launch in 2 to 4 weeks with aprs on it. Going to use an APM1 for a RTL function.

Any suggestions on how to have the RTL go into effect only AFTER we drop from balloon ? Don't want the control surfaces going wild on the way up to 100,000 feet. Uses too much of the battery juice. Going to use rudder control to move pin to release the cord to balloon at proper time or ???? suggestions .

I also have a fet controlled hot wire cutter for cord that takes a digital signal to activate. Maybe use this ?

Earl

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Permalink Reply by Larry Grater on May 29, 2012 at 8:52pm

Earl,

I was planning to load waypoints prior to launch, have APM defaults set up to be in Auto (did this on last HAB flight), modify code to not call servo outputs until drop altitude or other off nominal condition.  This is somewhat spelled out at the bottom of my NTNS-1 postflight.  But... the code has not been written yet.  When is your flight?  All needs to be checked in the simulation.  It would be really bad for this code to fail.

Have you settled in on a method yet? 

Regards,

Larry G 

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Permalink Reply by Mike on June 9, 2012 at 8:47am

Balloon Resources:

1) Tracker

2) Predictor

3) Burst-calculator

Lastly, great guides and ideas from the UK High Altitude Society, for example, conceptional idea to use a digital compass to adjust the high altitude glider rudder and use the feedback from the GPS heading to guide the glider in the desire direction after balloon release. Or, tutorial linking an Arduino to a NTX2 Transmitter.

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Permalink Reply by Hamilton From Above on August 26, 2012 at 11:47am

 

Hi Mike,

Are you aware of any HAB teams in the Hamilton-to-Toronto area; either MAAC members or Radio Amateurs?

-peter

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Permalink Reply by Mike on June 9, 2012 at 9:14am

Here is a good and inexpensive GPS for high altitude, rated 161,000 feet (50,000 metres) - Arduino 5V Compatible uBLOX MAX-6 Breakout With Sarantel Antenna.

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Permalink Reply by Mike on June 9, 2012 at 9:30am

How to use an Arduino for radio tracking of balloon flight . . . set one pair of Arduino PWM pins to 64kHz frequency - the two values are used to emulate serial between 2V and 2V2 into the Radiometrix NTX2 TXD pin. From the ground, AM-SSB USB radio frequency produces tones which are then fed into a computer running sound card program dl-fldigi to decode the 50 baud RTTY from the balloon and upload it to the central web tracker. Source: UK High Altitude Society

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