Our goal for our group project was to attach a Raspberry Pi with a camera to a balloon and send it to very high altitudes to take pictures of earth.
Process
First, we set up our camera Pi with Raspbian, and made a script to automatically take pictures and save them to a folder. After that, we had to start planning and making what we were going to do for our GPS (to find the device after it has landed) and the case to put everything into. James had the great idea of using an Android phone as our GPS, since they have their own battery, GPS, and we can program it to send us the GPS coordinates to our phones by text.
Skills Used/Learned
For this project, we used our programming/scripting skills for the scripts and GPS, construction skills for building the case, and we are using our detailed planning skills to plan our launch.
Problems & Solutions
Some problems we ran into > how they were solved:
- Controlling the Pi with a laptop through an Ad-hoc network > We discovered we had wireless stability issues, so we did the things we wanted to do in alternative ways (e.g. made scripts to do what we wanted to do instead)
- Programmatically doing GPS scans with an Android phone > Discovered that in GPS there are 2 different methods of finding coordinates (GPS provider and Network provider) and that you have to tell the script which to use, how long to use it, and what to do with the results after (like convert it into coordinates and send it through text)
Improvements
Some improvements that we could make to the setup are:
- An automatic air steering system: have it scan for GPS coordinates, and use flaps to control the flight to keep it from floating too far away from the original launch destination
- A GPS system that shows us the position of the balloon as it's moving on Google Maps (i.e. a live streaming GPS feed, track it while it moves)
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