Dave Akerman

This Saturday (13th September) I’ll be helping RS Components and Reading Hackspace to launch Superman into near space where he will jump down in the footsteps of Felix Baumgartner and (more famously) Babbage Bear, parachuting safely down to Earth.  Full details on how to watch or track will be here on […]

Yesterday I put up a fairly involved flight with 3 trackers using 2 new tracking systems, plus a reliable old tracker to make sure I got the payloads back! One of the new trackers was a “UKHASNet” node, sent up as a last-minute thing following on from a successful flight by others […]

High Altitude Ballooning is an increasingly popular hobby (I nearly said that interest has been “ballooning”, but fortunately I stopped myself just in time …), bringing what is termed “near space” within the reach of pretty much anyone who is willing to put in the effort and spend a moderate […]

This was the third flight of the “Pi In The Sky” board, but the first flight of the new open-source software written specifically for it (previous flights used a modified version of my usual Pi tracker software). The new software is a single multi-threaded program (instead of a collection of […]

PRE-SALE NOW OPEN The first batch of boards are in production. We’ve had a lot of interest and have decided to open up the shop for orders. The board is supplied as a kit including: Pi Tracker Board Spacers and mounting screws GPS Antenna Radio Antenna Battery cable Order Now!

What you see below is a simple and reliable GPS radio tracker board for the Pi. Together with the supplied, open-source software it embodies the experience of about 40 successful flights, nearly half of which have used the Raspberry Pi. It features: Efficient built-in power regulator providing run time of […]

To much relief, Alban the school mascot was recovered from a tree in a field in Cheshire. See this write-up in the local Cambridge newspaper. The “floater” flight initially did very well, ascending at the target rate (which is a challenge in itself with these flights), and turning west at […]

Weather permitting I’lll be doing 2 flights for St Alban’s Catholic School. Members of their Code Club will help with the launch and recovery, whilst others will man Mission Control at the school. The first flight is a “floater”, expected launch time 11am, which is intended to fly west over […]

This was a flight to test some cameras under the demanding conditions of near space. First, I was sent a prototype of a 360-degree camera which is the subject of a KickStarter campaign. I installed this plus a large external battery (to extend the run time) in a foam polystyrene […]

This is a follow-up to an earlier post where I made a car tracker from a Raspberry Pi, GPS and a small TFT display. Since then I have: Replaced the GPS receiver with one using an external antenna Replaced the display with one that’s easy to install in my chase […]