Dave Akerman

Tidying my office a few days ago, I came across some car reversing monitors that I used to use as cheap Pi displays for use in the chase car, to show the distance and direction to the payload; these days I use the official Pi touchscreen as it’s a lot […]

I sometimes receive emails asking which HAB tracker is best to buy, so here I will compare the ones I have direct knowledge of.  First though, if you have or want to have the ability to build and code your own tracker, do that instead!  It’s much more educational to walk […]

NASA have given us many iconic photographs, such as “EarthRise” and “Man On The Moon“, but there’s one which is more easily replicated if you’re not NASA or Elon Musk, and that is the image of Bruce McCandless floating freely in space during the first untethered spacewalk: So several months […]

My next flight is planned for this coming Wednesday, 7th February, to commemorate the first untethered spacewalk by Bruce McCandless on the same day in 1984, by trying to recreate the classic image: There will be a total of 3 Pi cameras with different viewpoints and different lenses, to best […]

This is to commemorate the very first untethered spacewalk by Bruce McCandless on 7th February 1984, as part of Space Shuttle mission STS-41B, when he used an MMU (Mobile Maneuvering Unit) to fly up to 300′ away from the Challenger Space Shuttle, and to replicate as best I can the […]

This was a fun flight to provide a remote serial terminal on a Pi, between ground and a high-altitude balloon, using a bi-directional radio link. LoRa Possibilities Most high altitude balloon flights use a simple unidirectional data stream from the balloon to the ground, sending the telemetry (balloon position and […]

This was a simple flight, partly to try out a fisheye camera for the Pi Zero, partly to try streaming the launch to YouTube from a new camcorder, and partly to get a launch in while the weather is good for it! Streaming I wrote previously about how to stream to […]

My PITS software and LoRa Gateway software both allow for uplinks from ground to HAB; in this post I’m going to cover how to use the facility to fill in missing image packets. Although LoRa has a very good range compared to RTTY for similar data rates, and in the […]

If you’ve made or want to make a lightweight Pi Zero HAB tracker using my guide, then you’ll need to sort out power for the thing (this is something that we do for you in the PITS Zero product). Many people use standard USB powerbanks to power a Pi for […]

When following a flight – whether it’s your own or someone else’s – there are some great online tools to see what’s going on.  The main one of course is the map, but there are also pages for showing live images and for displaying sensor values graphically. HAB flights in […]