N800 travel to space?
 

I was watching a show which gave me a neat idea. They took a solar panel and put a magnifying lens over the top, and used balloons to send it to space to test it out.

I have an n800 with a broken stand, a broken battery cover and a scratch in the screen. The scratch is not bad, but I have my 810's now so I really dont care anyway.

I was thinking of getting some people together and sending an n800 into the upper limits of our atmosphere. Have some camera and GPS coordinates reporting back? We would also need some cell phone to pair to send back data. When they did this on TV, the package landed 50 miles away.

I guess I see no real reason to do it, but it sounds fun to do.

Thoughts, Ideas, suggestions, laws, regulations, call me stupid, what ??

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

well, I don't think you will actually get to space :) assuming you are using a helium balloon. I think the air gets too thin for helium to have any rising effect maybe a few miles up or so, but not sure. Still though you could get pretty high, maybe you can put in a big minisd card and take a pic every second or so, that would be cool.

You could get an at&t gophone for this kind of one time use, giving 'go'-phone a whole new meaning :)

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Speaking of Space, when are we going to find a new reposistory for Google Satellite?

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

in the end, you're basically throwing away a tablet, GPS receiver, cell phone, and solar panel, right?

OH, hey, don't they have standalone GPS tracking devices with some kind of base station to monitor their location? then you wouldn't have to worry about the cell phone component, and you could just give ME your n800. ;)

EDIT:
here you go. £150, though. hmm....
http://www.snooperuk.com/products/snooper_tracker/

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Somebody have an better use for it, let me know, maybe I will just send it to you.

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

there's a person in another thread with a defective (sort of?) n800 that might have bricked today. if you're feeling charitable, you could send it to him/her...

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...hlight=bricked

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Penguinbait, you mean something like this ? Apparently the balloon can reach over 30km of altitude (a 60km vertical roundtrip), so no wonder it can get quite far horizontally as well depending on winds. Too bad gphoto2 is so unstable :(

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

I used to have a gps program setup on my 770, which was a long time ago. I ported it to my 770, originally it was running on a laptop running linux and a live camera feed as I drove down the road was in the spot where the text is now on my page.

http://penguinbait.com/index.html

It was all just plain shell scripts. wget is used on the 770 and it calls a sh script on my webserver and gives it directions, which would dynamicly generate new html files. I used camserv for video from the laptop.

It would be nice to send live video from the flight

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

You would definitely have to insulate the package and if using a camera, have it peering out of some plexiglass. It gets REALLY cold in the upper reaches of the atmosphere and I'd bet the electronic devices in the package would stop functioning at some point before landing. (Styrofoam's a popular payload capsule)

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

iirc gsm has a range limit somewhere around 30km, not in signal but due to signaling... Comercial gps receivers probably refuse to work over 60k ft altitude (wouldn't want 50 dollar components usable for ballistic navigation etc)

You can start by making it all work in your freezer for 24 hours :)

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Actually, ballistic systems don't really navigate (in that phase). When they finish acceleration, it's all momentum+gravity (hence the name ballistic). Thus, I wouldnt make it a security issue when there are plenty of simpler tech reasons for it to stop working (like good old overflows, visibility of high number/below horizon satellites, etc).

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Since it has a GPS and phone, it knows it's location, and if properly programmed, can use the phone to tell him about it. Then it can be found. Sounds like a fun geocaching end to the experiment :D

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Easy to say, hard to track :) It can land anywhere within a good 100km radius. And that's a quite literal anywhere. Depending on where you launch, that's sea, river, tree branches, mountaintop, private/state/company property, building top/sides, really, the possibilities are endless, firemen are at an advantage here :) And if it lands in a populated area, add the speed factor to retrieve it before somebody else does - the race factor :)

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

True... I live in rural middle-of-nowhere-ville in the woods, so I was only thinking about the trees getting in the way. And kinda thinking about the fact that there isn't much cell coverage near me.

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Actually I recently flew to Dallas and was able to get a gps fix by holding the N810 to the window of the plane. Clocked the speed @ 484MPH @ 27000Ft before losing satellite fix. I believe the difficulty in maintaining a fix was due to the aluminum skin of the plane rather than hardware limitations. The unit seemed to be confused as to exactly "where" I was but my guess is this is due to the difference in time dilation between 484MPH & 30,000Ft and sea level (give or take a few thousand feet) and traveling 70MPH on the ground GPS systems have to take into account that clocks on GPS satellites run a bit slower than clocks on Earth in order to get an accurate location fix. So you are most likely correct in that you may mot get accurate data unless you could figure out how to modify the gps software.

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

[digs engineering hat from the closet and puts it on]

um, no...relativistic effects have nothing to do with it with regards to the speed or altitude of the plane. If you were able to calculate both an altitude and a speed, the system knew exactly where you were. Accurate altitude determination requires a solid 4-sat fix minimum (4 unknowns require 4 equations/satellites) though due to geometric issues altitude determination will have a larger error bar. By accurate, I mean within the limitations of the CA code and use case. With a 3-sat fix you can get a good approximation of altitude (especially if stationary where you can average out errors to increase accuracy) depending on how clever the programmer was.

And speed requires that such a fix is maintained over time to get the deltas in position over time.The software you were using might not have properly displayed that information for some reason (intentional or otherwise), but that's a display issue and not a calculation one.

However, all that said....thanks for the observation :) It's always interesting to see people doing novel things with these tablets :D

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Thanks T
By accurate I meant that it was not able to display the streets on the map. Might have been moving too fast for the display to keep up... Not sure...
Anyway it was still cool. Not sure what the crew would have done had they known I was using the gps. In retrospect it might not have been too pleasant. LOL

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

I would think the unknowns are 3 (i.e. x,y,z) but the fourth satellite might be needed to reduce errors from timing, approximations used in the algorithms to make the calculations faster or something similar.

Basically, my question is what's the fourth unknown?

Thanks.

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Anyone notice this?:
http://space.1337arts.com
$150 to produce this:
http://space.1337arts.com/wp-content...9/09/thumb.jpg

Re: N800 travel to space?
 

Hehe, a very cool idea, but tricky to pull off. also if you were to have it take pictures, resolution could be an issue? i mean, if you want the pictures to be of 'globe-worthy' quality :P
Also: technically i think it may count as launching a satellite? which requires permission from the government, but i may be wrong!