Dave Akerman

On Sunday I presented my project at the “Raspberry Jam” in Egham, Surrey. Over 30 Pi fans braved the snow and ice to attend. I managed to stretch my 15-minute slot to over an hour, but even so I didn’t notice anyone falling asleep! For anyone interested, I’ve uploaded my […]

Back in June 2006 a guy called Steve Carter posted this in the pistonheads.com photographic forum I decided to send my tiny teddy bear on a world trip (via post to other people) and get photos of him in as many different & interesting places (maybe doing daft things) as […]

Someone (apart from me!) thinks so, according to a comment on my flickr account! Also the same photo (see below) is now on Steve Randall’s Random Engineering site. So to return the favour, if you’re planning your own weather balloon flight, the best place for balloons, parachutes and other bits […]

Back in May 2011, before even my first launch, I was at the Smithsonian Air & Space museum in Washington DC and spotted one of these cute little potential astronauts: Back then I was still building my first and very conventional payload, but I bought it anyway for a possible […]

For Buzz6 I wanted to make the lightest payload I can, to try and beat the world altitude record. That record was in the hands of Steve Randall who’d beaten the previous record a couple of weeks before. I helped with that a little, including driving Steve from Cambs to […]

My first flight had a miniature Buzz Lightyear “Commander” on board. Now I’m going to step that up and fly a much larger Buzz within view of one of the onboard cameras to photograph Buzz “flying” in space. To do this I needed to make a lightweight yet rigid support […]

I’ve added some a technical section to the site to help those who are building their own payload, or are simply interested in how it all works. See the new menu options above. Here’s the latest page: SMS Gateway

Here’s a photographic step-by-step showing the build of a small, lightweight (16g) tracker from off-the-shelf modules. First, the modules, from left to right the BMP085 pressure and temperature sensor, Arduino Mini Pro 3.3V 8MHz, RFM22B radio transceiver, and a Falcom FSA03 GPS receiver: First step was to solder on wires […]

There are lots of reasons for wanting to get the payload weight down – it can save money (less helium / smaller balloon), or can mean more height with the same size balloon. Also very small payloads are used for foil balloon flights which, although they only get to 4km […]