Updated May 31, 2008 22:39

Here is some info about starting my design and construction of my high altitude balloon, Prock-1. Some of this has been copied from my balloon blog. I will put in more detail and pictures on this page, but still watch the blog for updates.

My intention for this page is to show how I have designed my balloon and what I used to do it. I will also be putting all my source code and design plans up on this site. You are free to use any of the source or hardware designs just make a mention to my site or me in your docs. When starting to get into these balloons I noticed that there is relatively no actual information on hardware, software, or methods for building and launching balloons. By the time I actually launch my balloon I will have all of this posted on this site.

As said before be sure to watch the blog for project updates and such. I will be posting all the current project info here and I will try to have an archive to show past designs and such. Now for the good stuff.

Prock-1

Here is the current schematic. Click to image enlarge. Click here for the source file in ExpressSCH format.

Here is the current mock up of the flight computer on a bread board with annotations.

Sorry if the text is a little hard to read in the image. This view shows the basic components that I am using and basic layout. In the next few weeks I will get out my trusty solder iron and Radio Shack proto boards and put together a rough flight system board that I can use for testing. More about the flight system. Here is a desription of the flight system broken down into parts.

Basic Stamp 2px Flight Computer Sold by Parallax Inc

Well more of a controller than a computer. It isn't really crunching numbers and such. The BS2px will control all the subsystems of the flight system. It will record data from the GPS, pressure, and temperature sensors.