I’ve been looking for a Raspberry Pi project to get my teeth into and, after a flash of inspiration whilst planning our Scouts programme for the year, have finally found the perfect project.

The Final Frontier

Space has always held a fascination with me, and it’s now possible to launch, track and recover a payload, with GPS tracking, real-time video and telemetry on a modest budget, certainly one our Scout group can afford.

Inspired by a post on the Raspberry Pi website about a chap called Dave Akerman, who launched a Raspberry Pi on a hydrogen balloon up to an altitude of just under 40K.

The kit can now be more-or-less purchased off the shelf now, with a plug-in board for the Raspberry Pi that handles GPS, radio telemetry and power regulation and a Raspberry Pi camera board can be added for video.

The radio telemetry can be received using a USB digital TV dongle, and the software is open source, or at least free to use.

The key component, weather balloons, are readily available on the Internet, along with a wealth of information from other groups that have already done this.

The Pi is the Limit

There are so many ways I can get our Scouts involved in this; project planning, map reading, electronics, software, fundraising, public relations, blogging… The list is almost endless.

I’ll be blogging the project from here, and will hopefully have some more news in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, keep watching the skies!

Links

• Raspberry Pi: Pi in the Sky
• The Pi in the Sky board
• The UK High Altitude Society