Got some shiny new blue PCB’s in the post today. They are indeed smaller and lighter, but I have some soldering to do before we know if they will work!
Thanks to Mitch and Jenny at hackvana, keep up the good work!
Left this write up a little late… But this was my first successful float! Using a cheapo R3 board powered from a cheap ebay boost regulator. These things are designed for > 0.8v input and 5v regulated output. It turns out by changing a resistor value you can modify them for 3.3v output. These things are not very efficient so only lasted about 8-10 hours.
We filled the 36″ foil balloon carefully using 1.5g of solder to measure the free lift. Which proved to be just about perfect (thanks Leo!). The tracker performed fine (still concerned about the GPS bug before, even though it did not reach 12km) and the balloon floated at a steady 3.7km for 10 hours before the batteries died over the north sea.
I have been working on a new tracker PCB which should be smaller, lighter and last longer. Stay tuned for updates!
This was a charity flight by Matt Downs to raise money for the Cats Protection League and Essex Air Ambulance. I offered to help out with launching and chasing with Matt and flew a cheapo R3 board as backup. Matt’s tracker worked perfectly and got some great stills from the gopro camera. However cheapo hit a bug at about 12km altitude and started giving incorrect GPS coordinates. The current theory is that the 808 camera I (stupidly) attached to the tracker in an effort to catch the burst, caused interference with the GPS. This caused the GPS to reset, taking it out of flight mode and defaulting back into pedestrian mode. 
We were in the paper!
Filling the 1600g balloon.
Letting it up.
Running with the payload to launch.
Easy recovery! Trailed out along the pavement.
After the disappointing signal reports from cheapo3 I decided to investigate the cause of this. The most efficient, fast and cost effective way of doing this was obviously to just build up a new board and launch it. This also gave me a chance to play around with foil balloons which seem far more suited than small latex for this sort of payload.
I made the 1/4 wave antenna using cat5 cable instead of telephone cable this time around and it seemed to make all the difference! Had lots of great signal reports and a fair few trackers. The software had also been updated with some power saving code dropping the current down to 50mA, and a distance from launch site calculation added. The tracker complete with batteries and foam box weighed in at about 40g.
I aimed for a fairly low ascent, but by just measuring this by eye in quite a confined space (my garage) it was probably a little on the overfilled side. I cannot imagine having to fill one of these outdoors!
Instead of using a plastic tube for filling I simply opened the valve using a drinking straw then filled the 36″ qualatex balloon using the filler nozzle on a disposable 50 helium canister.
I filled 2 small latex balloons to use as wind indicators and to test for tree clearance. Just as well as the first one got stuck!
Launch video:
Unfortunately the balloon did not enter a float despite its fairly slow ascent rate. At about 5400m the balloon started to leak gas. This looked like it was leveling off for a float. But then started to descend at about 1.1m/s.
As the balloon descended I tried to decide if I should go to recover. My inverter went missing and I doubt my old laptop would have lasted long enough to be worthwhile. I sat there and watched as the balloon crossed the River Thames and bounced along between 100-200m altitude as it rode thermals over the town.
We lost contact with the payload at about 60m altitude over Bexleyheath golf club. Just then Steve (G0TDJ) stepped in to save the day! With his mate Ken at the wheel, they drove down to the golf club to take a look around. After a few minutes with nothing seen, one of the golfers pointed them in the direction of the A2 (eek!). Luckily it seems that the balloon was blown to the side of the road by the traffic and up onto the fence.
Steve caught a passer by just in the nick of time to pass the balloon over the fence to him after convincing him that the payload was NOT in fact a bomb and he did NOT need to call the police! A close shave!
As you can see below the payload had landed directly below the tracked position. I can only presume the balloon floated further on and was blown back down the road, or the wind was directed downwards due to the shape of the trees.
So all in all a successful flight. The new antenna is tried and tested. I have some experience with launching foils. The HC49 RFM22B showed slightly less drift than usual, I will be interested to investigate that one further.
Comparison of RFM22B’s (Standard HABsupplies on top, alibaba board on the bottom)
Thanks again to all those who helped track, and an even bigger thanks to Steve and Ken for going out to recover! CHEAPO5 to follow sooner than you may think 🙂
Last week I launched a test flight of the new cheapo boards to test how they performed against the old ones. Sadly the results were disappointing with a very weak RF output.
We aimed for a low ascent rate (1.2m/s, which we came very close to!) and released it out to sea.
After the balloon had traveled a couple of miles I noticed the signal was much weaker than anticipated, after eventually losing the signal altogether after about 25 miles.
Luckilly G8KNN (Cambridge), jijdaar(NL) and a few others jumped in to save the day, and managed to track the thing all the way up, and most of the way down (to about 5km).
Sadly the payload did not make it into Europe, however I am glad to have had the chance to test the new boards before relying on them for a much more expensive flight.
UPDATE: On the 30th June 2013 I had a phone call from a woman on the island of Borkum (Germany) who said she had found the (badly damaged) payload in the sea!
I would have loved to have seen some photos of the payload, but unfortunately she did no have access to the internet. After spending about 15 days in the north sea I expect the tracker would have been damaged beyond repair, so I said not to worry about sending it back.
You can see in the (badly edited) image below quite how far the payload drifted from its tracked landing location.
I believe the problem was down to the antenna being made from cheap single core telephone cable (which I thought would be extremely similar to cat5, which works well). I will launch another board in the next few weeks with either a cat5 or a coax antenna and see if there is an improvement. In hope to be able to source a small step up regulator board to allow future flights to run from just one lithium AA cell
The new CHEAPO boards are here! I have soldered one up and all seems to be working perfectly! Here is a quick write up on the results.
New board compared to old, looks much neater!
Main components of CHEAPO3
Weight of CHEAPO3 with and without batteries
Micro SD card installed (2GB seems like overkill for text logging!)
Current consumption of board whilst acquiring GPS fix, writing to SD card and transmitting = 110.9mA. This will drop when the tracker gets a GPS fix and if the SD card is removed for long duration flights. I think I will have a go at optimizing the code and look into the power saving modes of the uBlox NEO-6
I am very happy with these boards and look forward to testing one in the air. Currently planning a possible pico launch on the 14/06/2013 (PM)
In order to use the uBlox chip in a high altitude balloon, it must be set to flight mode to enable its use up to 50,000m altitude.
This mode is set by issuing a UBX command over the serial port, then checking its acknowledgement (ACK) packet response. There are great examples on UKHAS of how to do this on an Arduino, However my Pi payload code is all in Python, a language I am still getting to grips with.
It turns out it was relatively straightforward to translate line by line, also improving my understanding of how the code actually worked instead of just blindly copying/pasting blocks of example code. I encountered a slight problem when checking the ACK response packet from the GPS against a expected response as the expected response was stored as an integer value, and the actual reply was stored as a character!
My code can be found on GitHub
The NEO-6 is a neat and affordable little GPS positioning chip with a few features which go unused in my other GPS tracker boards. One of these features includes a direct USB connection to the chip, allowing it to be used with a computer.
The circuit is quite simple, consisting of only the ublox chip, a few resistors, and a voltage regulator in order to power the 3.3v chip from the 5v USB line.
My circuit is based around the diagram in the uBlox hardware integration manual (page 12)
The PCB design is less than optimal, but this was really just an experiment into the use of USB.
Result! It works perfectly!
I was not sure at first if it would show up as a USB serial port, or some other kind of input device. However it appears in device manager as a “uBlox 6 GPS Receiver (COM11)” making it nice and easy to program with.
I can also confirm it works out of the box with the Raspberry Pi, accessible via PySerial, making it perfect for the SSDV Pi payload I am also working on (more to follow shortly).
I have just sent off the designs of CHEAPO3 to be manufactured by Hackvana.
Thanks again to Upu for checking over the boards for me and helping with EAGLE.
After my first launch of NSE we still had another balloon and some helium left over, so we planned for another launch using only one tracker, but a proper canon camera this time.
We went up to Cambridge to meet Steve Randall at the EARS rocket launch site. It was nice to see some of their big rockets going up (despite one landing worryingly close to our balloon whilst filling it).
The wind picked up a little so we decided to reel the balloon back in and try Steve’s “Hail Mary” launch technique. This pretty much consisted of releasing the balloon upwind of the payload, letting it take up the slack, then throwing the payload into the air! As scary as it was to watch it worked very well.
You can just see one of the rockets being collected that landed very close to us in the photo below:
The flight covered about 20 miles as the crow flies and reached and altitude of 24.5km
Flight path of CHEAPO
The Canon A530 camera worked a treat, although my DIY 4x AA battery holder failed just before launch. I popped just 2 lithium’s in the camera but they still lasted the entire flight!
Here are a few photos:
The recovery was nice and easy. We sat around near the predicted landing site with a great signal on the 5/8 magmount, switching to the 3 element yagi when it hit the ground.
The signal was extremely faint on the ground as the antenna got squashed flat on impact! After hunting around with the yagi we got one decode and set off on foot after it.
CHEAPO in flight 808 cam video:
The 300g mil surplus balloon expired in 2010 so I am happy we got a decent altitude out of it! However the transmission power was once again very poor. It has been suggested this could be down to a problem with the PCB track on the board, or a faulty RFM22B transmitter module. I will turn the output power right up to hopefully achieve 10mw ERP and do a flight soon to send the CHEAPO prototype to its grave in the skies! Proper boards will be ordered from the board house very soon 🙂
CHEAPO2 altitude/time graph.