Dave Akerman

My next flight is an attempt to reproduce Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking skydive as part of the Red Bull Stratos project, albeit on a slightly smaller scale. The flight is due for launch about 10:30am this Saturday morning from Berkshire. Landing prediction is a few miles SW of Newbury. You can […]

Back in December 2012 I helped The Register with a test flight for their “LOHAN” project. Sadly, that flight ended up very wet in the English Channel due to reality completely disagreeing with the predicted flight path, after the Met Office failed to fly any balloons themselves that day. The […]

Back in March I built a lightweight Raspberry Pi tracker comprising a model A Pi and a pre-production Pi camera built into a foam replica of the Raspberry Pi logo: The aim was to send images from higher than my record of just under 40km, so the tracker was pretty […]

This was my fifth “Pi In The Sky” flight and originally was to be an altitude record attempt using an extremely light photographic payload, however such a flight this time of year is likely to end up in the North Sea. Been There Done That don’t want to do it […]

Earlier this week I went along to the Oxford Geek Night where they had a Raspberry Pi themed night. The Pi is obviously popular in Oxford (despite any possible Oxford – Cambridge rivalry – the Pi was born in Cambridge), and the place was absolutely packed. The only spot I […]

Raspberry Pi in a TARDIS takes stratospheric self-portrait For my fourth Raspberry PI weather balloon flight I wanted to pack as much into the flight as I could, making full use of what the Pi has to offer: 3G link for video and backup telemetry Send telemetry over 3G from […]

HAB (High Altitude Ballooning) is a growing hobby where enthusiasts use standard weather balloons to put small payloads typically 100g-1kg into “near space” at altitudes of around 30km or so, carrying a tracking device (so the balloon position is known throughout the flight) and usually some sensors (temperature, pressure etc) […]