Here is my APM2.5 at my apartment in Albuquerque NM. See the 3 waypoints and home position?

Thanks a bunch Kevin! http://www.diydrones.com/xn/detail/705844%3ATopic%3A1094076

My android tablet is a Pipo S2 at $122 from Banggood.com…

It flew ! For 50 feet off ground. Premature rope cut ! Dang....getting closer

Moment of ground release.

Next…

You always have that ONE flight where nothing goes right. 7-27-12

The balloon slipped off the filling neck and got away. We had a backup balloon ! The second helium tank was EMPTY.

Dang..what luck.

Soooo... I will show pictures of the X8 wing we will try to launch Friday 8-3-12.

The Big…

RECOVERED !!!

The balloon is in the air as we type. @ 40,000 = ft.

Check out call sign ke5vsh-1 on aprs.fi website. You can track the progress in real time from 15:30 GMT 9:30 AM…

UPDATE .... 7/2/12 ...

Another successful flight to over 100,000 feet with the same APM2 and 3DR radios on board. This picture is the balloon exploding at over 100,000 feet. Total flight was 101 mins this time. The APRS tracker failed this flight but the package was recovered in a 1/2 hr by a citizen…

3rd time for this APM2 and 3DR radio combo ! The temps ranged from 100 F on ground to -51 F at one point in flight.

We did have a failure on the 3DR radio at -51 F. Radio died and won't come back.

We used the APRS.FI tracking as well and it showed great.

As you can see, there is NO insulation in our…

Can you spot a piece of the burst balloon against the total blackness of space at 100,000 ft. ?

You can also see how thin our atmosphere is !

See the curvature of the earth.…

On 4/14/12 we flew an APM2 ardupilot in a balloon to over 100000 feet for 7 1/2 hour 300 mile + flight !

The flight originated near Albuquerque NM and landed near Trinchera ,CO. The flight was over 300 miles and lasted far longer than we planned. The flight was so long the 5 on board cameras ran out of memory…

The er9x transmitter now will display MavLink data on the LCD.

Gerard Valade a DIYdrones member wrote the software and myself who was the principal debugger.

Works at 19200 and 38400 baud. Still have a problem with 57600 baud. Some kind of timing issue yet.

Here is a pic of the arduplane 2.30 MavLink display on the er9x.

There is an Xbee inside the er9x to…

How about this new Raspberry-pi Linux computer for $25 or $35 coupled with a sensor board ?

Has a header on board, video 256k memory hdi video or composit usc sdcard.......

see here for all specs.. …

I have a spare Mega 1280 where the serial input line is bad.

So how to program it with no FTDI serial0 input ?

Notice the ISP pins in lower left ?? Thats how !

I use a program called eepc that is used to reprogram the er9x R/C TX. It does it via a $14 usbtiny ISP device from Sparkfun. Google for…

Photo shopped in screens…