Posts tagged app
A slower pace and Astdroid’s own spinoff
Nov 4th
A couple days went by without hearing new of Astdroid, but I remained optomistic. A week went by and my hopes faded slightly. At about a week and a half in I admitted some amount of defeat and purchased a new phone. Now that it’s been a couple weeks I have no choice but to wonder if Astdroid will ever be found.
It’s been slightly demoralizing in some senses, the launch and communication with the phone had gone so well, but in another sense it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Sending a phone into space and recovering it is an ambitious goal to begin with. Couple that with bare bones equipment and a first try and it would have been very impressive indeed to have had a 100% successful inagural launch.
The silver lining for a failed first attempt is found in lots of lessons learned. In studying our data, reading of other lost balloon accounts, and taking a hard look at our code, I know our next launch will be a drastic improvement.
Perhaps, in some sense, things moved a bit too quickly. In an attempt to stay in the zeitgeist of the internet (and its notoriously short attention span) I wanted to get this project running and to its first success as soon as possible. Some things were overlooked, others consciously ignored in favor of a speedy schedule. I put alot of work in a short period of time, which was great, but with it came bugs.
After the failure to recover the first attempt at flying Astdroid the last thing I wanted to do was immediately sit down and start over again. I realized that doing so much so quickly had burnt me out.
About 2 weeks ago, having had some time to relax my brain, I revisited one piece of Astdroid that had bothered me and contributed to its recovery failure, the location tracking. Although the code I had written had worked as anticipated and we were able to watch Astdroid fly in real time across Denver, the battery it used to do so drained it incredibly quickly. In my tests it had gone from a full charge to 0% in about 2 1/2 -3 hours. As the balloon took much longer than anticipated to reach the height we expected, it’s quite likely that Astdroid wasn’t even on at burst, much less on the way down.
I have since completely rewritten the location tracking code, breaking it up into a separate project and greatly improving the battery life achieved while running it. In my estimation, the battery life has been increased on the order of about 3-5 times (I’ll be able to be more specific with some additional testing).
Since the end goal of Astdroid is to provide an application that others can download to replicate the project, I consider this a big achievement in redesign. We all know that 2 1/2-3 hours of batter life simply won’t due if the end goal is for this application to operate without the assistance of other devices for such an ambitious task.
Like I said, there were lots of lessons learned from the first flight. I’m approaching things this time around with a little more attention to detail and a lot slower pace. You’ll continue to see updates here, but they may be fewer and farther between. Rest assured though, this project is by no means dead.
In breaking out the live tracking code of the Astdroid project and taking a deep look at it I realized it had a use as a utility on its own. I decided to spawn off a project for that functionality called LiveTrax. I consider it a tangible byproduct of Astdroid’s software achievements.
LiveTrax is currently available in the Android Marketplace for free. With a couple button pushes your phone is tracked in real time and a link to a unique url is provided for your to share with your friends and family.
In addition to tracking a phone as it hitches a ride with a weather balloon I envision it to be useful for hiking, road trips, and races. Even something as simple as “I’m on my way to meet you, here’s where I’m at now u.livetrax.me/m/____” It’s often illustrated how many great products we use today originated from NASA ventures, I consider LiveTrax spawning from Astdroid much the same way 
I’ll be adding some cool features in the coming weeks so stay tuned! I’d love to know what you think!
Almost there…
Aug 25th
Just wanted to provide a quick update for everyone and let you know that Astdroid is moving along quite well.
Last week I was able to complete a significant amount of work on the app. It is now able to track, take timed photos (from both front and rear facing cameras), and post location updates to a website for live tracking. The website side of thing still needs a little work, but it should be operational shortly.
As far as the craft itself, all the pieces are in place. I recieved the recovery parachute I ordered from Rocketman and now have the last of the parts I’ve ordered. Need to do some work on securing things, establishing windows, and insulating but that shouldn’t take too long. Truthfully, I’ve seen successful projects succeed with much less so I feel good about the design and consideration we’ve used.
I’m getting more and more confident in the app doing its job and the phone being the only necessary electronic component in having a successful and recoverable flight. That being said, rather than risk a $600 phone I decided to buy a second-hand Spot GPS Tracker off my buddy for $150 as a form of insurance. With it riding alongside Astdroid, should the app fail we will not only be able to recover the phone via Spot, but also learn what may have gone wrong and fix any software mistakes.
The list of what remains to be done before launch is pretty slim at this point. I’m looking forward to announcing a launch date soon! Stay tuned!
Hello, Astdroid.
Jul 27th
The fierce attention over the Astdroid project as a consequence of the post on Mashable has died down quite a bit in the last week, as is to be expected. Good thing, really, I don’t know how long I’d have been able to keep up. Still getting emails everyday from people offering their help and support, which I will never have any complaints about, no matter the quantity.
While the press about Astdroid is great and all… we haven’t done anything yet! I can only hope that we see this kind of attention after we’ve successfully completed our goal! With that in mind, let’s get down to business.
I think that with every update to the Astdroid project, 3 topics should be addressed
- Where does the project stand?
- What are the next immediate steps we hope to accomplish?
- A question, something that I could use some help from the community on answering.
I’m not a aeronautical engineer, nor a meteorologist, nor much of a designer, and truthfully not much more than a software engineer with huge desire and drive to make this project a success, so please feel free to hop in any time, either via the comments, email, or the Google discussion group I’ve just set up.
Where does the project stand?
Moving right along, actually. I have recently received 4 weather balloons that I’ve ordered from Kaymont, a website I’d been referred to via the blog of a similar project. I ordered two 200 gram balloons and two 500 gram balloons. The 500 gram balloons will be the ones we’re likely to use for flight, ultimately. The 200 gram balloons will be used for testing.
Looks weird, but gets the job done
You’d be surprised at just how much helium is needed to achieve lift of something that weighs only a couple ounces. Being impatient in waiting for the true weather balloons to arrive I spent a Sunday afternoon trying to see how many of those punching balloons (remember those as a kid? bigger balloons with rubber bands attached) it would taked to raise a Flip Mino HD off the ground while taking video.
6 gram balloon test failure!
Well… it was a failure. It seemed that the balloons popped at the exact frequency with which it was necessary to prevent them from crossing threshold of getting off the ground. I expect to see much better results from actual balloons designed for this kind of thing.
From an app perspective I’ve been busy there as well. Essentially, I’m working on creating a dashboard of sorts with all the information that will be useful to monitor from Astdroid as it takes flight. Any fellow developers, think of it as “Hello World” for the instruments of the phone.
Blurred out the exact location of home. You know, for space nerd stalkers
It’s been fairly easy and straightforward so far, programming wise. Haven’t hit any major stumbling blocks, which is always a nice surprise.
What are the next immediate steps to be accomplished?
The first thing I’d like to do now that the balloons have arrived are test a 200 gram balloon tethered to the ground carrying a Flip Mino HD as a payload. It will be a cool way to test payload designs, establish how much helium will be needed to bring something the size of the EVO (roughly) off the ground, as well as capturing some neat video in the process. I’ve got about 1,300 feet of mason line, so it should still get pretty up there without flying into too much danger.
Question: Knots?
In rigging up my failed contraption of punching balloons I had several fly away from tying crappy knots. Not a big deal, costing about 40 cents apiece, but that’s a different story when talking about the weather balloons as they cost between $25 and $35 each. Not to mention the disasters that could take place if the wrong parts detach at upper altitudes.
Does anyone have any suggestions for what knots to use, where I can learn to tie them, and what would work best for tying to a balloon and then subsequently attaching a payload to that?
Sounds like a mundane question, but it’s these little things that can doom a project. Just ask NASA and the Mars Climate Orbiter which crashed into Mars because of a conversion between imperial and metric.
If you’ve got any ideas leave a comment or respond at the discussion group post!
