The students seem to have no lack of talent. What I would like to do is to brainstorm some qualified solutions for them and then turn it over to the students for the construction and programming. I just met the gentleman in charge of the project last night so it is not like I am “part of the project”.

I think us Hams and electronics buffs can offer some suggestions but I don’t want to do the work for the students. I think that this is all part of the learning process.

kw

It’d be slick if there were a way to attach the LEDs to a small helium balloon on a 5′ tether, to get them up above the height of weeds, fences, etc. I don’t see any way that could be done without the balloon and tether getting tangled in the main line, though.

A chirp should be doable, although I expect you’d be able to see flashing LEDs from further away than you could hear a chirp. Still, if the LEDs are on the ground, they may be hard to spot.

I just bought a batch of ATtiny25s — cute little eight-pin microcontrollers at about $1 each in quantities of 25. Seems to me that might make a nice platform to build something that would wait 30 minutes (reprogrammable) and then start flashing every 15 seconds (also reprogrammable). You could also toggle an output pin to drive a piezo chirper.

Where would you like to go with this? Is this something you’d like to build for them? Looking for help, or just ideas? Would they even be interested in outside contributions?

Based on the tracking data from the 2 APRS beacons, they speculate that the payload (a 50′ or so string with multiple packages attached to it about 5′ apart) encountered turburlance as it crossed 50K feet. Data shows that it was coming down about four times faster then ACES9 which was launched a few minutes prior. At around 20K feet and within 5 minutes of each other, ALL radio transmitters ceased functioning. Speculation here is that the package, now damaged and spinning on it’s decent slung what was left of the wire antennas.

They have a very narrow search area that they spent a good deal of time searching for the package. However, the schedule forced them to stop. These are students and volunteers. They have printed up REWARD posters with maps and photos and local law enforcement, game wardens, etc are all willing to keep a look out.

The total flights on these are only suppose to last about 30 minutes max as I remember. In the videos of the launch, you can hear a morse beacon but I am not sure if that was being emitted from a nearby radio or the tracker itself.

I was thinking that a visual indicator and a chirp emitter that was on a 30 minute delay would aid in the recovery of future flights. Obviously weight is a factor but they are powering the experiments off of 9V Lithium batteries.

Here is the link to the program: http://laspace.lsu.edu/aces/index.html

Specs of ACES10: http://laspace.lsu.edu/aces/FlightInfo/2007-2008/ACES-10/ACES10_Flightinfo.htm

Ultimately the goal is to get the student’s experiments back. They weren’t overly concerned with the radio gear.

kw

Tell me more about the balloons. How long do they stay aloft, that eight hours tracking on a GPS won’t do the job? How do you detect when the payload has returned — just wait long enough? What about adding another GPS radio on a time delay to transmit location after it’s landed? How large an area are they searching?

And, are you sure this isn’t just an excuse to get me to figure out the USB interface and LiPo power management ICs I got, so I can finish the puck?

I was at a Ham Radio meeting tonight and I thought about your hockey puck idea. Long story short the LSU Physics team lost one of their balloon payloads. They have GPS tracking radios on them but they only last about 8 hours.

I was thinking about some sort of time delay device that would activate after the payload returned. There would be either a single high brightness LED that was attached to some sort of 360 degree diffuser or multiple high brightness LED. It would pulse every 15 or 30 seconds depending on how the battery life is.

Another feature would be a piezo beep that alternated with the LED for a more even battery drain.

Thoughts?