so we need a pod for all of our stuff to go into... right? so we got the phone and the battery packs and the Arduino and put it in a box (this is not the box we are sending in space... this is just to test the size) that we thought might work. we set all the stuff into the little box and arranged it to be perfect... however it was to small and that was not to much of a problem because this was just a test box. we then placed all the stuff on a piece of paper and measured the dimensions and we figured out the right size: 17cm wide, 21cm long and 12cm high
0 Comments
We visited a local welding supply store called Matheson. We need helium to fill up the balloon so we had to find a store that was selling helium cheap. Welders use helium to help with their welding so the weld doesn't rust. The guys at Matheson were really nice. They were interested in our project. They agreed to sell us a 125 cubic foot cylinder of helium for a really good price. We recommend Matheson!
We then realized we needed to figure out if that was enough helium to fill the balloon. Our goal is to get to 100,000 feet altitude, or 30,500 meters. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The two factors in altitude are payload and balloon size, so we needed to estimate the weight of the payload. We weighed all our parts: 330g 2 battery packs (android and arduino) 327g foam box 150g android phone 75g arduino with SD shield and screw shield 45g 2 temperature sensors 45g 2 hand warmers 40g rope 311g parachute (we weighed a shirt since we didn't buy it yet) 28g power cables for phone and arduino 15g GPS sensor for altitude, works with arduino without wifi 10g piezo buzzer so we can find it when down, works with arduino 1376g total -- or 3.05 lb This is a good weight because it has to be below 4 lbs per FAA regulations. Phew! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We used the payload mass to figure out what balloon we needed to get to our target altitude. We went to http://habhub.org/calc/ and it told us we can use the Kaymont 800g balloon with 93.8 cubic feet of helium to get to our altitude! Our time to burst will be 142 minutes or 2 1/2 hours. It also told us how fast the balloon would rise. This is a really cool website. Looks like the plan is looking good!!! |
AuthorMalachi and Ezra's page where we build cool stuff and either break it, set fire to it, etc. in the name of science. Archives
August 2019
Categories
All
|