High Altitude Balloon

(HAB)

Project Introduction

This project challenged me to build a payload for a High Altitude Balloon launch. The payload was then launched with the 2016 Project HALON Launch on May 15, 2016. The assignment was to use a Raspberry Pi to collect and record data using my choice of a variety of sensors in order to measure some characteristic of Earth's atmosphere. In my astronomy classroom, I'd use this as a way of getting students to think about the atmospheres of other planets and what they might want to measure for in their search for a habitable world. This project hasn't been done with my students yet, but the results section will show you the outcome of my launch with HALON.

Of the three projects detailed in this portfolio, this one was the most challenging for me, but also the most rewarding to finally get it right in the end.

Project Materials

Student groups working with Project HALON had all materials provided to them by University of Nebraska - Omaha. To my knowledge, my payload was the only on that used the Arduino UNO, so it is possible to make this project less expensive than the version I am presenting. My reason for using the Arduino was two-fold. 1) I am familiar with the Arduino, so I knew I could easily program it to collect the data I needed, and 2) Arduino will read analog signals from the sensors rather than just "high" or "low" which will provide me with much more useful data.

Table

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NAME	NAME	NAME	NAME
Jeanna Schmal	Jeanna Schmal	Jeanna Schmal	Jeanna Schmal
Caren Rials	Caren Rials	Caren Rials	Caren Rials
Leon Rogol	Leon Rogol	Leon Rogol	Leon Rogol
Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera
Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera
Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera
Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera
Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera
Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera
Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera
Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera	Shala Barrera

Project Assembly

Shape your future web project with sharp design and refine coded functions.

As with the microcontroller project, the project assembly portion will show physical assembly of the launch payload, a diagram of the circuit, and the code I used for each portion.

Next, I open up the Arduino environment to see Serial Monitor. Unfortunately, this was the trial that ended in error, so you don't see the serial data in this run. I do open up the log.txt file to show the raw data from my balloon flight so you can see what it looks like. Anything worth watching ends after about a minute and a half, the rest of the video is me waiting for serial data which never comes.

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