I'm running out of title ideas, give me some ideas in the comments. Anyway, why the post is here, so we wanted to see what the problem with the temp was! so we tested constantly (the engineer way, try and make it fail till one way works). On out flight, we collected the temperature data, and here it is. the temperature made sense for the first 25 minutes, but then it went all bonkers and came back. We don't trust the ending part. We had two theories about this situation. 1. we thought that maybe there was a power issue in the box. Perhaps the temperatures were getting weird and messed with arduino battery. The reason we thought this is because the GPS went wacky at the same time. So we did a experiment where we plugged the arduino into reliable 5 volt constant power, but it still glitched. During this test one sensor was on the coffee table, and one was inside the box with two handwarmers. 2. We wondered if there was too much data coming to the arduino all at once through both the software and hardware serial ports. We read that sometimes these ports conflict. So we ran the arduino again, plugged it into 5 volts power, with the GPS powered but the data line disconnected (we plugged the communications line between the gps and aruino out, so nothing would interfere). During this test the sensors were just laying on top of the coffee table overnight. as you can see from this graph, there is no longer a glitch on the data. So on our next flight we will use a different software serial port.
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I bet a lot of people who have seen this site have been wondering "do they have actual proof they made it? maybe photos or footage?" well we do. Here it is: Just to clear our act, we did NOT illegally fly over that airport. We were above the height of its class B airspace. We shot the video with the keychain 808 camera. Available off Ebay for $10. The airport part is near the end. :)
This flight was supposed to be about 2 hours and 55 minutes, which by the way, it was 3 hours and 11 minutes. so the time was very accurate to our predictions. we know this because the arduino recorded the GPS launching and landing. We were able to retrieve the GPS data from the arduino and put it in Google Earth to see the flight path. however, we only got the first 21k feet then lost signal and got the descent from 40,000 feet. These two section of flight are in the right places. we were kind of frustrated when we could not see how high the thing got, so we did some engineer math and stuff to figure out a theoretical flight profile using the NASA atmosphere model. it rose very slowly to 94k and fell quickly due to not much air resistance. This is the file of GPS "NMEA" sentences recorded by the Arduino. You can open this file in Notepad to look at what a GPS writes, and you can do File>Open in Google Earth to open the flight path and see where the balloon went... ![]()
Well, its everything you guys have been wondering, did we get data? Is it good data? Did it take good photos? How high did it go? Well... some of the info was good, but sadly, some was not there, or total garbage.
Here are the things the mission was supposed to complete: 1. Rise above 90,000 feet and come back in 3 hours - PASS, 93,000 feet in 191 minutes. 2. Send us gps location when landed - FAIL, found it by a trusty farmer 3. Shoot video from keychain camera facing downward for an hour - PASS, got an hour and 15 minutes as high as 40,000 feet! 4. Record temperature data outside and inside the box - FAIL, the later half of the flight said it was 110 F outside! 5. Record GPS data of whole flight - PARTIAL FAIL, it lost data in the middle of the flight, but recovered and got the end. ------------------------------------------major fail------------------------------------------------------------- 5. NO PHOTOS... it ran out of battery and didn't save the photos in the phone, it was a lost data file that we could not recover. in the next couple of posts, we will show you the keychain camera footage and the temperature data PLUS a downloadable file of the flight path you can put in Google Earth (if you have it) it was a overall success and not a science disaster, but wait! There's more! We are going to launch again in summer (80% chance). see you soon! -the gang |
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
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