penguinbait | # 1 | 2009-04-17, 18:56 | Report

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 ??

quipper8 | # 2 | 2009-04-17, 19:05 | Report

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

Den in USA | # 3 | 2009-04-17, 19:15 | Report

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

jmjanzen | # 4 | 2009-04-17, 19:41 | Report

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/

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Last edited by jmjanzen; 2009-04-17 at 19:48.

penguinbait | # 5 | 2009-04-17, 19:52 | Report

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

jmjanzen | # 6 | 2009-04-17, 19:58 | Report

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

attila77 | # 7 | 2009-04-17, 20:40 | Report

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

penguinbait | # 8 | 2009-04-17, 20:58 | Report

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

Hedgecore | # 9 | 2009-04-22, 16:52 | Report

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)

shadowjk | # 10 | 2009-04-26, 04:59 | Report

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