PIE1 – Raspberry Pi Sends Live Images from Near Space

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) […]

“Pi In The Sky” Presentation at Egham Raspberry Jam

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 […]

Pi Pico Balloon Tracker

Balloon Tracking As you may know, my main hobby is flying weather balloons, using GPS/radio trackers to relay their position to the ground, so they can be tracked and hopefully recovered. Trackers minimally consist of a GPS receiver feeding the current position to a small computer, which in turn controls […]

Pi In The Sky + GoPro

Although the Pi camera is a very good option for live imaging from a Raspberry Pi tracker, it does have its limitations -mainly due to its plastic lens which is a moderate wide angle and not as sharp as some.  There are alternative lenses to try and some are very […]

Pi Zero W Streaming Dashcam

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 […]

Pi LoRa 868MHz Flight

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 […]

DIY Lightweight Pi Tracker with SSDV

A few months back, Raspberry Pi brought out a very very nice little case for the Pi Zero, including 3 different front plates one of which accepts the Sony Pi camera.  After several minutes measuring the internal dimensions, I reckoned I could just about fit the parts for a HAB […]

Astro Pi Flight – Update

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 […]

Pi In The Sky Board for Pi A+/B+

Here (at last – sorry for the delays) is our new version of our Pi In The Sky Board, designed for the Raspberry Pi models A+ and B+. These new Pi models required a few changes: New smaller form-factor Connector to fit the new, larger, GPIO pin header Mounting points […]

Pi In The Sky Add-On Board

What you see below is a simple and reliable GPS radio tracker board for the Pi. Together with the supplied, open-source software it embodies the experience of about 40 successful flights, nearly half of which have used the Raspberry Pi. It features: Efficient built-in power regulator providing run time of […]