Dave Akerman

The day started well, with a bright moon shining through and between the broken clouds. Not the last broken cloud of the day! That’s Jupiter below and to the right of the moon. When everyone arrived, we set off to the launch site to get the balloon inflated and the […]

Cloud2 is my second attempt at a photographic flight. Basically, it’s similar to my first flight but with smaller and lighter GPS receiver, GPS antenna and flight computer. The container is much more compact than before, and is designed for much quicker assembly before launch. A piece of coax connects […]

With the software all written and tested, it was time to package the electronics into Buzz’s spaceship. That involved unsoldering all the wires then connecting everything up again using measured lengths of fine wire. Here’s the tiny flight computer: I fitted the components into the spaceship top, except for the […]

Well, that’s the plan! The aim with my first balloon launch was to take photographs from around 29km (100,000 feet); this one will be to get as high as possible. The UK record was till a few weeks ago set at around 36km, but is now 40.5km. My target is […]

An update is well overdue, so here it is … I needed a suitable radio receiver both to test that my radio transmitter was working OK, and to track the balloon during the flight.  After a couple of abortive purchases I ended up with an AOR AR8000 which is a […]

Next job was to get the transmitter running and prove it was transmitting correctly by hooking up a receiver to decode the radio signal.  The program waggles a single output pin which is then reduced in amplitude and offset a little to match the transmitter’s requirements.  Here’s the resulting signal […]

I now have the temperature sensors connected to the flight computer, and all the software written to poll them, send the data to the attached PC, and display it there.  Same goes for the various battery voltages which I want to monitor to see how well they cope with the […]

For still pictures I’ll be using my Canon IXUS 50, a tiny camera that takes excellent photos and weighs a fairly low 135g.  However a test a couple of weeks ago showed that it only manages about 600-700 shots on a single battery charge (with display off – that makes […]

This will be my home page with links to my interests, projects and businesses, and maybe some infrequent blogs too.