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!