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 We managed to make it to the farm in Ohio. it was a Looooong drive. When we arrived, we weren't sure if we were at the right place, but we were told by the farmer, that seemed to be waiting for someone, that we were. Farmer Jeff is the guy who found it in the combine harvester. we also met his wife. he was keeping the box in his garage along with his dog who seemed to like the box and was sleeping near it. Jeff and his wife were really nice and were curious about our project and, we assumed, really wanted to see our blog. (Hi, if your reading this.) Jeff told us that he was harvesting 20 miles from his place, and he told us how to get there: from what we could tell by the box, is that it was chewed on, rained on, covered in mud, cut up by a combine harvester and the adopted home of MANY bugs. (personally, i think that bugs should NOT exist.) but everything was present and not all that damaged. however, the parachute was gone (we assume the farmer needed it to be cut off because it was jammed in his harvester.) As you and me know, we lost our flight box for unknown reasons.
#5 God kept the box. (we can now eliminate that from the list.) We have been hoping (and praying) that a farmer would be riding his combine and see our flight box out in the corn and say: "is that some box out in my corn?" then he would walk out and pick it up and say: "that a phone number?" and then call it. But that didn't happen. Instead, a farmer was driving his combine and suddenly his combine lost tune. He then got out and looked in the feed box to find a styrofoam box equipped with a parachute and phone. And he was kind enough to call my dad. The box was unharmed! :) In case you didn't figure it out yet, we indeed did find the box. Surprise. We plan to drive down to Findlay OH this weekend to meet the farmer, see the location, get the box and put the pictures on the blog. Stay tuned. this post is ALL about the flight and the results of this mission... so... many of you have been wondering "why do they call it 'science disasters''? well... let me tell you: because the whole thing WAS a disaster! we got our launching position and everything was going to plan. Here are some pictures of the launch: So we tracked the balloon with the OTHER phone. so while we waited for the balloon to burst (3-6 hours) we used the extra helium from matheson to fill the gloves we were wearing to fill the balloon. :P we saw the tracking and after about 1 hour it was at 30,000 feet when it should have been at 50,000 feet. This was the last contact we got from the balloon. As you can see it has a continuous rise rate in the picture below, so it did not appear to be rising slowly because it was leaking, it may just have not had enough helium for some reason. One thing we noticed is that the phone battery was very hot at 116degF, maybe because it hadn't hit the super cold air yet. Even at this slow rise rate the balloon should have burst in 222 minutes and been back on the ground in less than 6 hours, easily within our 10-12 hour battery life. To say the least, the mission was a Science Disaster, and we lost all of the arduino and phone etc. RIP. Our theories on what happened: 1. The phone was shut down due to heat... 2. The lipo battery on the extra video camera could have exploded due to heat. 3. It could have been chopped up into hamburger by an airplane. 4. The balloon might have floated a long time due to not enough helium, and by the time it came down the battery was dead. 5. God kept the balloon. 6. Putin viewed it as a threat and had a satellite take it out. We hope someone out there finds our payload and visits this blog and calls the number on the box -- 313-805-2800 to return it for a nice reward! "It was a great experience" - Ezra. "That was the most disappointing day of my life" - Malachi "Malachi is always negative" - Ezra "It was fun" - Malachi "Stay tuned for our next awesome Science Disaster..." - The Team. We weighed the flight box with all final stuff in it, and it has come is quite light at 1125g or 2 lb 8 oz. This is great because we can achieve higher altitude. We re-ran the burst calculations and, sure enough, the balloon will rise much faster (4.33 m/s) at this lighter weight. 2 hours to burst at 100,00 feet. Neck lift of 1927 grams will be used to set a lift mass that we will use to make sure we have the right amount of helium. At the lighter mass, the payload will drop more slowly on our Rocketman 4 foot chute, around 13 ft/sec or 3.9 m/sec. With the new faster ascent, and slower descent, we ran the predictor for 9am Sunday morning and it looks like we will launch near Hillsdale MI and enjoy a 3 hour flight!!!
So we went to the place called Matheson on Middlebelt in Garden City (which you might remember from an earlier post) and bought some helium. the guys there were REALLY nice... in fact i bet one of the guys are reading this right now... ( hi! :D ) so we bought the helium canister and think we got the right amount of helium: 125 cubic feet.... So now all we need to do with the helium is find out HOW to get it inside the balloon... luckily the guy at Matheson had a balloon filler nozzle too.... so that's a bonus! But now we need to learn how to DO it... actually... i wonder why welding requires helium.... anyone know? what?! you think i weld?!?! well... i don't...
ok so we obviously dont want to land in a bad spot right? such as water, trees, and all that stuff! so we looked at google maps and found out trees are the dark areas and blue is... well, water see? the fields are the light patch in the bottom right corner and the rest is trees! So we looked at MI, and as you know, MI is all trees basically so we look around MI. we found nothing good in MI. the closest state to MI is OH, so we looked around and found a good place to launch and land. the problem is the drive is 3 hours away but a LOT of fun is coming out of it! we plan to launch july 07, 2016! we might send a video of it launching and when we find it so look for those future posts! we are super happy and cant wait! this is what the flight predictor predictedin the upper atmosphere it gets -60F above 10,000 meters, So we need to counter act the cold with the epic powers of the handwarmer. we got our awesome box and we then put the arduino and wiring and handwarmers X2. we sealed it like it was going on a flight. so how do we test it? well almost everyone can! so we put it in our freezer and pluged it in (to power arduino) and we were off! i like to spell in big wordswe took the data of the arduino after 4 hours. the freezer is at about 0F AKA of and the inside was about 55F. yey good news!
well theres not much to say about tying knots... theres only pictures... so... uh... i dont know... just stare at these for about 4 hours and your for sure going to be dead... so... yey we also had to test the parachute... so... what do you think we did??? yes... well if you thought we thrown it off our roof... then your right... we dont think mom saw the video yet... so we dont know if shes mad at dad for doing that. The Parachute worked, Dad didnt fall off the roof, the box didnt get damaged, and we had tacos that night. AKA big success.
With the Arduino (Flight Computer) soldered up we connected the cell phone power bank and let it log GPS and temperature for 6 hours. When we looked at the data on the SD card, it was all chinese characters - honestly! The files were messed up. This made us think that the program got goofy after running a long time. THen we checked the voltage on the power bank and it was down to 3.4 V so the Arduino got unstable. We thought we could use a new battery pack and drove to Electronic Connection (Westland). It was closed so we went to Radio Shack and bought a 8-cell AA holder and loaded it with Energizer Lithium AA batteries. WIth 8 cells it had 14 volts! We connected Dad's multimeter and measured 300 mA of current. When we took two batteries out it dropped to 10 volts and we still measured 330 mA! So we decided to only use 6 batteries. We connected it so the current still flowed because the holder needs 8 to work. We checked the battery stats at: http://data.energizer.com/PDFs/l91.pdf and it looks like we can get 10 hours out of these batteries if they stay warm, and 5 hours if they get really cold. So we need to hand warmers to do a great job! 0.3 Amps is 300 mA.Dad connected the meter wrong and blew it two times! Almost let the smoke out!
We got the parachute and the balloon today. They look pretty cool. The parachute is red and smaller than we thought. Ezra flew it in front of a box fan and it opened up. The parachute only weighs 106g. This is good news because we were not sure so we had weighed a 330g shirt and this is a lot lighter so we will get higher.
The balloon came in a small bag in a small box. (car key for scale) We used a breadboard to try out the circuit for the temperature sensors and the GPS. Now that it's working we decided to remove the breadboard and solder all the wires onto the screw shield. This will make sure none of wires fall out during flight.
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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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