A record of my projects

I’ve had quite a few friends suggest a GoPro camera for recording video but most of the ones I’ve seen that weren’t “Naked” were well over $200 which is above my comfort zone for now. I decided to goto a brick and mortar shop instead of using ebay so that if I buy something and it doesnt work I can take it back and get something different. I asked the associate in the camera department what her suggestion would be since Google was not turning up any results that were helpful and she suggested instead of a thin digital camera that also does video, why not just get a digital camcorder. After some talking she suggested the JVC HD Everio GZ-HM40BU. It supports SD, SDHC and SDXC cards which means I can toss a 64GB card into it, and at $50 a pop on ebay I will be using a 64GB card, and my only obstacle would be battery life. So I took it home after spending about $212 after taxes and got it set up. I only have a 16GB card currently so I tossed that in and pointed it at the laundry basket and hit record. An hour and 10 minutes later it shut off. I took out the card and looked and it still had almost 5GB of space left so after another test I confirmed it died because of battery life. The battery that comes with it is a 3.6v 700 mAh battery. JVC in it’s infinite wisdom has developed a 1400 mAh, 2100 mAh and 3750 mAh battery. For those of you who don’t deal with electronics enough to be familiar with mAh it stands for milliamp hours. It determines based on amperage usage how long your electronic device will run. The higher the mAh rating, the longer your electronic device will work. Most portable electronics run in the mAh, but it’s fairly simple to convert to actual amp hours if you need to, 1000 mAh is 1 amp hour, so 3750 mAh is 3.7 Ah. And since my camcorder came with a 700 mAh battery that runs for roughly an hour and 10 minutes that means that 3750 mAh will run for about 5 hours and 50 minutes give or take which is plenty for our needs. So without further adieu here is the pics:

Here are 2 videos from the camera, one is of me boiling some eggs, the other is my laptop crunching SETI:

Video 1

Video 2

So I originally bought a Samsung PL20 for video recording on the balloon but after getting it home and doing a trial run the file format it uses results in about a 3.2GB file after 26 minutes of recording. So I needed a video camera that can do at least 1 1/2  hours of video recording continuously, so I bought a sony bloggie MHS-PM5. I believe it was about $40 after shipping and when I got it, it had a 16GB SD card in it. After doing a test on it, it stops recording after 30 minutes. Not because it’s out of space, but because it’s just designed to stop after that time frame. So I am on the hunt for another video camera that can do at least an hour and a half of video. I am leaning towards either a Panasonic LUMIX DMC-ZS3 or a Samsung FlashCAM SMX-F34BN. Since the camera is going to be in a balloon thousands of feet above the earth it would be impossible for me to continously restart the video camera’s record function and I do not have the electronics skills to automate such a process. Here are some pics:

Here is a video, it’s grainy but that’s probably my fault for messing with the settings.

Sony Bloggie

So in the previous post you saw all the things I’ve purchased and what they will be used for but in this one I’ve got something I felt deserved it’s own post. I bought a desk flag set from ebay because with my payload I wanted an American flag and a Air Force flag. They arrived and look like this:

The American flag is because, while I am afraid of my Government, I love my country. The Air Force flag is for my Dad. He passed away back in Sept 2010 and he was my inspiration for getting into electronics. He worked for the Air Force for many many years and after retiring he worked as a contractor for Dyncorp before the contract was then won by Lockheed. He also did woodwork and made some wooden puzzle snakes and was always creative. I think being exposed to someone who could be methodical, logical as well as creative has really opened me up to some of the stuff I do now. My dad didn’t get a chance to really see me embrace my inner nerd/geek even though I owe a lot of it to him. So when I do my launch my payload will have these 2 flags that represent someone or something that I love.

I miss you dad

This is the first post chronicling my, hopefully successful, attempt at a high altitude balloon. I’m sure you’ve all seen the amazing pictures that come from other high altitude weather balloon projects you know it can be pretty amazing! If you haven’t I might suggest taking a peek at this page. So when I found out about these projects I did alot of reading, then I went to IRC and talked to some of the people who have actually done a launch and recovery on their own to get a feel for the level of difficulty, expense and enjoyment they had with their own projects. What I’ve found is that most people use APRS.FI to track their payload and most people consider their payload a work in progress as they add and remove electronics, change cameras etc. So after a few conversations I went off in search of the stuff I need to do my own launch. That started with the balloon, most people buy Totex balloons from Kaymont in NY but they only took phone orders and since I didn’t want to wait for a money order to travel in the mail to them, then wait for them to cash it, then wait for them to send my balloon and I didn’t want to give them my credit card number over the phone I decided to look elsewhere, if you’re from Kaymont and are reading this Paypal can set you up with links to order through their payment systems and you’d probably get more orders, and arrived here where I ordered this:

1200 gram weather balloon. At ground level it fills to about 6 feet around, when it’s at altitude it’s burst diameter is 25-30 feet. It was about $100 and I signed up for a free trial to Amazon Prime and got 2 day shipping free! Next I got ahold of a guy in my area who has done a couple balloon projects and sent me a filler nozzle kit which works out great and looks like this:

So you add a quick disconnect nozzle on the bottom piece, put the other part in the balloon and secure with zip ties or duct tape or both, and use the string to secure the balloon to the payload. When you’re done your setup should look like this:

You can get most of the components from your local lowes or home depot and shouldnt cost you more than $50 for the O2 hoze, quick disconnect attachments and the PVC.  The next step was to get the payload, with this I went with what everyone else was using which is styrafoam coolers, they’re designed for low temperatures, easy to customize how you see fit and best of all cheap. Here is my payload container:

As you can see there is plenty of room for all the gear I’ll be adding to the payload. I picked this up from Wal-Mart for about $10.  I then spoke to my friend in Iowa who has done a few launches of his own that gave me the filler kit and he suggested that for a parachute that I talk to his friend at Top Flight. After checking their site I bought the standard 50 inch parachute. After shipping and handling it was about $35. This is what was sent:

At this point I have the balloon, payload and parachute covered. Time to get into the electronics.

Electronics

With my electronics I knew I was going to have at least 2 cameras in the payload, one for recording video and one for stills. For the stills I went with the Canon Powershot A560 which you can find all day long for under $50, and which supports CHDK which is a custom OS addon for Canon cameras that allow you to do things like like a picture every x seconds which is perfect for my needs. I may buy a second and/or third since they’re cheap and I may want multiple angles. Here is my A560:

Next I looked at video, I originally bought a Samsung PL20 which at the time was a $70 camera that takes 720p HD video. When I got it home it does in fact take 720 resolution HD video but it does not support exFat or NTFS so that means that after the video reaches 3.2GB(About 26 minutes in) it just stops instead of creating a new video file and continuing on. So I decided to employ my other camera, the Olympus X-560WP which looks like this:

This camera doesn’t do HD video but it does appear that it can save at least 2 hours on a 3.2GB file if I can resolve the battery life issue.

With the cameras out of the wayI had to get a GPS. The GPS is for this launch just as a logged flight capability so that I can export the NMEA statements into GPSBabel, get a KML file and be able to see the flight path. I originally was going to use a Lassen IQ GPS module but after buying it the leads on the SMD header are too small to connect anything to it. There was a breakout board built but the folks who made them are no longer making them. My attempts to get them to send me the gerber files so that I can have my own boards made have been unsuccessful and I don’t have the skills to design my own board. So I decided to use a GPS module I had on hand. I unfortunately can’t tell you where I bought it, how much it costs or if it’ll have the bug some GPS’s do where the manufacturer uses an OR operator instead of an AND. I won’t bore you with the details but it boils down to all GPS modules that are subject to export cannot operate a GPS module due to CoCom limit above 60,000 feet AND at a speed of over 1,000 MPH and some manufacturers instead of using AND, use OR so if the GPS module goes above 60,000 feet it’ll shut off. Here is the pictures of the module and I will let you know after the flight if it works:

This is plugged into OpenLog which looks like this:

The 16GB microSD card is just as a reference for size. I will probably use a 8GB card since they’re about $5 a pop on ebay. The next device I’ll have is the BMP085 which is a Barometric pressure sensor that can also measure altitude and temperature. That device looks like this:

Since this kicks out quite a bit of data it simply wouldn’t do to have it dump into a data logger. So I also purchased a Arduino Uno and a Logging Shield which, when assembled, looks like this:

and it dumps the converted data to a CSV file. I haven’t figured out yet how to take that file and create a shiny pie chart yet so if any of you Excel wizards out there know a trick let me know. Finally for payload tracking and recovery after the balloon bursts I am using a $100 Android Optimus V from Virgin Mobile and will be using Seekdroid to track it. This should get me to within 100 feet of the payload. Now I just need to find a lauch site that’s a few miles in any direction from a city or major highway. Stay tuned for updates!

So recently I was asked to read this blog post about why someone hate’s android after sticking up for the fact that it is in it’s purest sense a decent device. I’d like to preface this by saying that I do own a iPhone, so I’m not saying this simply as a anti-apple-fanboy hater who simply hates everything that a Apple fanboy likes or loves. I have personally sat, evaluated my needs and have come to the conclusions on my own. With that out of the way lets begin. The iPhone 4, the model I have, has a camera in front and in back. The front sporting a 0.3 MP camera, the rear is a 5MP camera. While the rear facing camera is good for 720p video it’s not all that imperative to me that its camera resolution is higher than say 3MP or so, I’m not Ansel Adams and neither are you. The front facing camera holds zero importance to me, none. You could offer me a lifetime supply of liver, and I hate liver, and it would mean more to me than the front facing camera on my phone. The iPhone 4 has respectable GPS capabilities and with the Find My iPhone app, recovery and data security are built in. It can connect to wifi networks and it’s ability to connect to weak signals is pretty high. When you’re using Sprint for your mobile provider, wifi is a godsend. Actually from my tests of my devices and friends devices as well unless you’re on Verizon, data speeds will undoubtedly suck. I’ll go more into this later. Bluetooth works well, pairing is easy and the iOS makes it easy to switch your audio from a bluetooth headset back to the phone effortlessly. All 3 handset models I had consider buying, iPhone, Blackberry and Android, all have Facebook, youtube and twitter apps so this point is moot.

So, why did I buy the iPhone vs an Android device? For starters I have either had Android phones, or very simple phones(i.e. $10 tracfone) and I’ve always had somewhat of a dislike towards iPhones for popular reasons but they were not reasons I had any experience in getting on my own. So I told myself that if I was going to criticize the iPhone I had better have some personal experience to back it up or be labeled an anti-Apple fanboy. The second reason I bought the iPhone was the mobile music store that is iTunes. I know there are apps out there(Spotify, Rhapsody, Grooveshark) that might allow you to buy music on your phone but iTunes took it a step further, you can buy music on your iPhone and it will automatically sync to your PC when you plug it in through itunes. No custom vbscript, no app to download it’s natively part of the phone. The interface is silky. If you’d told me that before I bought the phone I’d ask you to define “silky”, for me its the smoothness that it transfers from one screen to another. There is no stutter, no hesitation. Apps open quickly and except for crappy network issues works flawlessly.

So why do I defend an Android? Well it’s simple, and it comes from the blog page I posted earlier, Google was initially trying to make a free, carrier unlocked handset. Now They should have seen that it is impossible to make a completely free contract-less phone, the hardware costs Google money and they should expect to recover that when selling the phone. When Google started out it was trying to get traction into a market dominated by the iPhone and various custom OS’s that didn’t provide features consumers were looking for. While a no contract, zero cost handset is unrealistic selling phones that are by default carrier unlocked is quite possible. But there’s a problem, they were trying to get mobile networks to sell their handsets and carriers do not want someone getting a phone from them, then taking it and using it on another carriers network. So what I believe happened is that Verizon offered to carry Google’s new phone if they carrier lock it. Now Google tried on a lesser known carrier to break into the cell phone market with the G1/HTC Hero with lackluster fanfare. Now here’s where it gets interesting, fast forward and today you can goto Walmart, buy a Virgin Mobile Optimus V phone running Android 2.2 for $100. No contract, no muss no fuss. If I goto Sprint.com and buy a iPhone 4 out of contract the price is $549.99. So for $450 more what do I get? Lets compare, GPS? Both have it and both are accurate. Both also use Google maps from what I can tell. Bluetooth? Both have it, both work well. WiFi? both have it, iPhone’s seem to pick up more networks. Cameras? Android only has a 3.2MP rear facing camera, the iPhone has a 5MP camera for the back, 0.3 for the front. The front camera is useless to me, so it’s certainly no dealbreaker for me nor is the MP difference. Apps? Both have extensive apps and active developers coming up with new content. Hardware? This is where the iPhone makes up ground, the touch screen is a better quality glas, the body is better built and more sturdy, sound quality is superb on the iPhone and the iOS runs effortless on the hardware. The only gripe I have here is the storage. The android has a micro-sd slot, where as the iPhone’s storage is static. What does that mean for me? Well let’s say I have 8GB of ebooks(Actually I have over 30GB..but I digress) and lets say I also have 8GB of Music, if I wanted to store all of that on the iPhone I’d have to spend $649.99 on a 16GB iPhone(Without contract)…that’s over $100 for 8GB of space! On the Android if I wanted to store all of that I could goto walmart, buy a 16GB card for $30 or buy 2 8GB cards and swap them out as needed. And If you didn’t stop spending until you covered what Apple is charging for the 8GB upgrade, you could buy 3 16GB microsd cards.

And for ICS or Internet Connection Sharing I actually care less about this feature than I do about the front facing camera. I called sprint shortly after getting my iPhone to see if they’d turn on the wireless hotspot feature for my iPhone. The lady I spoke with said they do not support that feature. From what I’ve read they do actually support that feature, it costs about $30 a month. I chose not to call back simply because I HATE when people do that to me when they get an answer they don’t like so I avoid doing it to other people unless I have to.

So to summarize, my $100 android phone is great if you’re looking to make and receive phone calls, text messages, picture messages, use facebook/twitter/G+/whatever, want to watch videos on youtube, have GPS with navigation, use bluetooth, use wifi AND the ability to find your phone with seekdroid, and be completely happy. You WONT be able to have a forward facing camera, use iTunes and automatically sync your music or survive moderate abuse without significant injury to your phone. When I bought my Android, I bought it with one goal in mind and that is recovery. it’s going 100,000 feet in the air where it gets REALLY cold, and then it’s going to fall to the earth slowed only by a small parachute. It fits the bill perfectly. I don’t think Apple will ever compete in this price market nor do I ever think it should.