Dave Akerman

As many reading this will know, I flew the new Pi Zero on the day it was announced, in order to test a prototype of our new PITS-Zero tracker board.  I’d been pleading with Eben since I first saw a prototype of the original Pi Zero, that its low weight […]

This was my second test flight of my 868MHz LoRa fast SSDV (Slow Scan Digital Video) software, to celebrate my 58th flight and 56th birthday. Fixes I made some changes to fix some issues with the previous test flight: Set RTTY baud rate to 300 to prevent RTTY Tx during […]

It’s now quite common for high altitude balloon flights to send down live images during the flight, as well as the usual telemetry.  However data rates from balloons are rather low, so each image can take several minutes to send even for rather low resolutions. “It’s currently a problem of access to […]

This is a packaged version of my LoRa gateway, for use when chasing high altitude balloons.  Based a a Pi V2 and official Pi screen, it currently features: Receipt and upload of LoRa telemetry messages to http://tracker.habhub.org/ Receipt and upload of LoRa SSDV imagery to ssdv.habhub.org Local storage of telemetry log […]

I’ve made some progress on my “tweet uplink” software, and now all stages in the process are fully automated except for a required manual approval step, in case anyone tries to spam the flight! The key new element is a Windows program that lists incoming tweets and offers Accept and Reject […]

Following my recent successful test of balloon-to-balloon communications, I had the idea of uploading messages from the ground to a balloon (via LoRa radio), and then have those messages displayed on the LED matrix of an “Astro Pi” Sense HAT, as will be used by Tim Peake during his stay […]

One of the reasons for me experimenting with LoRa modules was that they are transceivers and should allow uplinks from the ground to a balloon, or communications between balloons.  Uplinks I will try on another flight, but for now I’m working on inter-balloon communications.  The eventual aim for this is […]

If you … Are a teacher or youth leader (e.g. scout group) Are interested in applications for the Raspberry Pi Would love to help your class or group send a weather balloon into the stratosphere and take live images throughout … then read on. In August, the Raspberry Pi Foundation […]

When used for tracking high altitude balloons, LoRa has the potential for a receiver to be set up unattended on a permanent basis, but only if it can automatically set itself to the correct frequency, bandwidth and other settings for each flight.  Originally I intended these settings to be taken from […]