Data Acquisition For Near Space Photography Experiment

Dear Sparkfuners:

This website is fantastic and filled with incredible stuff… Alas, I am a mechanical engineer and know only the basics of electronics - hoping you can help me pick out some items please.

I am doing some near space photography and will be sending a weather balloon and payload to around 110,000 feet sometime in May. I would like to put together a small data acquisition system that can be sent up with the payload to collect the following information:

Atmospheric pressure

A couple of temperature points

GPS data (IF POSSIBLE)

I only need to take this data 1 - 10 times per minute, or even as low as 1 time every 2 minutes. Temperature within the enclosure should remain above freezing as it’s well insulated and will have some heaters installed. This isn’t a major project and I am willing to keep things as simple as possible and maybe increase complexity for the next flights. Let me know what ya got please!!! Looking forward to this. Flight time is expected to be 2-3 hours… Also submitted this to tech support…

Mike

Go to the SparkFun homepage and search on “balloon”. Then click on the results “Blog” tab.

  • Chip

I do not work for SparkFun.

Very COOL!!! This will be my 3rd launch and we have most of the balloon related aspects worked out via painful experience. Even when something doesn’t work quite right, it can still be a LOT of fun and a valuable learning experience… Hint for anyone planning on launching a balloon… DO NOT USE FISHING LINE… It will cut you, even with heavy duty gloves on!!!

Anyway, so it looks like I will need TMP102 for temperature, BMP180 for pressure and DEV-09530 for data logging… ?? good start! THANKS!!!