Dave Akerman

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 […]

Those of, cough, my generation, will remember watching with awe as a President’s clear and concise statement of intent was brought to fruition, played out on our monochrome TV sets as grainy, ghostly images accompanied by words that will last for as long as mankind. And thus were inspired a […]

On Saturday I helped with a school launch by Greg Tomlin, who drove here from Coventry with his SKYBLUE payload and a minibus full of excited schoolchildren. It was their first launch, but not Greg’s, as he’d launched twice before with his previous school. Predictions were for a fairly gusty […]

For a while I’ve wanted to build a “Flight Readiness” unit that I can have near me when filling a balloon, and will show me if the tracker is running OK or if there’s a problem with the tracker or receiver (e.g. it may have drifted out of tune). To […]

I usually run a video stream from my launches, using webcam attached to a laptop or more recently with my Chase Car Pi, so that people following the flight can see what’s going on. Following a suggestion by Anthony Stirk, I decided to set up a second streaming camera which […]

Last night I went into London to meet up with other Pi enthusiasts over a pint, and to do a talk about my Pi-based weather balloon activities. Thanks to Andy and Matt for organising it and inviting me! Here’s a pic from Andy of me in “action”: The talk seemed […]

Following my previous post, I’ve now packaged up my Pi Chase Car system, using the new Raspberry Pi GPS Board from HAB Supplies. The original GPS receiver, purchased on ebay, just wasn’t up to the task of getting a good GPS signal inside a Raspberry Pi case.  The HAB Supplies […]

Chasing balloons across the country is one of the best, and probably the most exciting, parts of high altitude ballooning, using a car kitted out with aerials, radios and at least one computer to decode the radio transmissions from the balloon and show the balloon on a map. I have […]

I’m delighted to report that, on the second attempt, Babbage the Bionic Bear was successfully dropped from just over 39,000 metres, with a video of the “jump” taken by the capsule camera, and with both payloads recovered. So all of the main mission objectives were achieved! The first attempt was […]

This flight is planned for Sunday 11th August, about midday. My flight is a single balloon with 2 payloads, each one transmitting “live” images plus telemetry. Another balloonist Anthony Stirk will launch his own flight, from the same site, shortly before mine. The main payload is called PIE. This has […]