Love this. Have a friend that regularly sends $30 balloons a few times around the world. They routinely end up over interesting areas like hot spots in the Middle East or North Korea. Would be great to issue commands to a light weight camera but the bandwidth is so limited - payload is a factor too - can only be under 100 grams or so. Bandwidth is in the order of 30 bytes per minute. Would be fun to take picture remotely and then drop the payload/memory card when the balloon circled back to friendlier territory.
When it flies over these unsafe areas, isn't it detected by the region's air defense systems and shot down? Or are these too small and high to be seen by such systems?
Even if it made sense to try to take out a balloon, the missiles that can reach 80,000ft+ are tens of million dollars a piece, and not that many countries have access to that type of missile tech.
That one was flying around 60,000ft and weighed probably about 1 ton. Very different kind of balloon.
It was shot down by an F22 with an AIM-9 Air-to-air missile. This is the highest altitude air-to-air kill known, and the first combat kill of the F22 platform.
Awesome to see HAB on hacker news! Was following some of your development years ago when I developed a small APRS tracker, have been meaning to revisit that project someday. Also developed a WSPR version that I haven't published any info on, but had a great trans-atlantic flight with that one. Keep up the great work!
I did one of these balloon launches myself several years ago, and attempted to build a flight computer myself with Arduino and multiple sensors. I could not find an efficient way to read all of the data from the selection of sensors in the limited memory, so I wound up using a Mega. Nobody involved was a licensed radio operator, so our live tracking was very primitive. It wasn't until after 45k' that we realized our GPS tracking stopped tracking at that altitude because why would a civilian be at that altitude. Of course we didn't know that until researching it after recovery, but we were very relieved when it started to updating once it came back under 45k'. Unfortunately, something happened (my coding to be sure) that caused the log to not be written as expected. Was hoping to be able to compare the GPS of the actual flight against the forecast model we used. This is the very thing I would have loved to have for future launches. I even made friends with a licensed operator to make it legit. (couldn't be bothered to take the test myself)
One thing to keep in mind for anyone wanting to do their first one. If you go to the trouble of printing up contact info for an "If Found", don't forget to attach it before lift off like I did.
I'm thinking of building a small PCB for ballooning too.
But I most likely will shift the design decisions a bit:
- 2.4GHz LoRa for high-rate telemetry as reciving can recycle Wifi-Antenna gear. The Semtech SX128x chips are easy to handle.
- Low rate telemetry on 433MHz with a SX12xx or SX17xx.
In terms of chips most likely something around the STM32U series.
The company ePeas has very interesting energy harvesters. Not super cheap - but still affordable. They have special profiles for supercaps which are very resistant against freezing.
Generally the higher frequency you go, the lower range you get as a rule of thumb. It's also harder to design around higher frequency boards, though it's totally doable. That said, I'd love to see how 2.4GHz works out!
Someone maxed out the ranging mechanism of the Semtech SX1280 with a 5dBi rubber antenna. He reached 60km with LoS. And there's a report of 90km in a ballooning project.
In fact, it's so robust that even when your antenna is a piece of wire hanging off a GPIO of a microcontroller with absolutely no dedicated radio hardware, you can still get several km of range. Truly crazy stuff.
In a previous job I pushed an STM32WL5 on a custom frequency over a private satellite constellation with a relatively large yagi antenna. Over 70k km round trip :D
The Semtech modems have several modulation modes which can be configured in great detail.. the datasheet is quite verbose about them.
The latest generation of chips (AFAIR not yet released) integrated a mode that allows them to receive on all LoRa speed grades in parallel. Bit like the existing LoRaWAN basestation ICs.
I remember reading a datasheet that one (already released chip) is also able to work on 144-146MHz. But that's not what standard Asia (ESP32+LoRa modules) offer. TTGO has AFAIR recently released a super new board that allows this band.
You should check out Sceye, they're hiring and doing this. Unfortunately you have to live in the middle of the desert in New Mexico, otherwise it's a cool company
Love this. Have a friend that regularly sends $30 balloons a few times around the world. They routinely end up over interesting areas like hot spots in the Middle East or North Korea. Would be great to issue commands to a light weight camera but the bandwidth is so limited - payload is a factor too - can only be under 100 grams or so. Bandwidth is in the order of 30 bytes per minute. Would be fun to take picture remotely and then drop the payload/memory card when the balloon circled back to friendlier territory.
When it flies over these unsafe areas, isn't it detected by the region's air defense systems and shot down? Or are these too small and high to be seen by such systems?
Even if it made sense to try to take out a balloon, the missiles that can reach 80,000ft+ are tens of million dollars a piece, and not that many countries have access to that type of missile tech.
I mean look at the US response to the Chinese balloons - took a bit of time and ended up being handled by fighters not missiles
That one was flying around 60,000ft and weighed probably about 1 ton. Very different kind of balloon.
It was shot down by an F22 with an AIM-9 Air-to-air missile. This is the highest altitude air-to-air kill known, and the first combat kill of the F22 platform.
What a meek first kill. The F-22 is meant to attack swarms of Chinese fighters over the South China Sea. One day it will.
Maybe it'll be over my house. Oh goody I'll get to watch!!
Awesome to see HAB on hacker news! Was following some of your development years ago when I developed a small APRS tracker, have been meaning to revisit that project someday. Also developed a WSPR version that I haven't published any info on, but had a great trans-atlantic flight with that one. Keep up the great work!
http://protofusion.org/wordpress/2015/10/featherhab-2-gram-h...
http://protofusion.org/wordpress/2016/02/featherhab-source-c...
How'd you maintain connection over the ocean?
I did one of these balloon launches myself several years ago, and attempted to build a flight computer myself with Arduino and multiple sensors. I could not find an efficient way to read all of the data from the selection of sensors in the limited memory, so I wound up using a Mega. Nobody involved was a licensed radio operator, so our live tracking was very primitive. It wasn't until after 45k' that we realized our GPS tracking stopped tracking at that altitude because why would a civilian be at that altitude. Of course we didn't know that until researching it after recovery, but we were very relieved when it started to updating once it came back under 45k'. Unfortunately, something happened (my coding to be sure) that caused the log to not be written as expected. Was hoping to be able to compare the GPS of the actual flight against the forecast model we used. This is the very thing I would have loved to have for future launches. I even made friends with a licensed operator to make it legit. (couldn't be bothered to take the test myself)
One thing to keep in mind for anyone wanting to do their first one. If you go to the trouble of printing up contact info for an "If Found", don't forget to attach it before lift off like I did.
Interesting!
I'm thinking of building a small PCB for ballooning too.
But I most likely will shift the design decisions a bit:
- 2.4GHz LoRa for high-rate telemetry as reciving can recycle Wifi-Antenna gear. The Semtech SX128x chips are easy to handle.
- Low rate telemetry on 433MHz with a SX12xx or SX17xx.
In terms of chips most likely something around the STM32U series.
The company ePeas has very interesting energy harvesters. Not super cheap - but still affordable. They have special profiles for supercaps which are very resistant against freezing.
If you're going to use LoRa with an STM32, consider the STM32WL5x. It's an ST32L4 with an integrated SX12xx.
I have at least 10 of them in my lab :-) Thanks for the hint!
Hey! Yea I've been looking into energy harvesting a bit as well after watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbtzlWb-Kc
Generally the higher frequency you go, the lower range you get as a rule of thumb. It's also harder to design around higher frequency boards, though it's totally doable. That said, I'd love to see how 2.4GHz works out!
LoRa is absurdly robust.
Someone maxed out the ranging mechanism of the Semtech SX1280 with a 5dBi rubber antenna. He reached 60km with LoS. And there's a report of 90km in a ballooning project.
(https://github.com/StuartsProjects/SX1280_Testing)
In fact, it's so robust that even when your antenna is a piece of wire hanging off a GPIO of a microcontroller with absolutely no dedicated radio hardware, you can still get several km of range. Truly crazy stuff.
https://youtu.be/eIdHBDSQHyw
In a previous job I pushed an STM32WL5 on a custom frequency over a private satellite constellation with a relatively large yagi antenna. Over 70k km round trip :D
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I'm interested in creating some form of live video/image system, thanks for this!
The Semtech modems have several modulation modes which can be configured in great detail.. the datasheet is quite verbose about them.
The latest generation of chips (AFAIR not yet released) integrated a mode that allows them to receive on all LoRa speed grades in parallel. Bit like the existing LoRaWAN basestation ICs.
I remember reading a datasheet that one (already released chip) is also able to work on 144-146MHz. But that's not what standard Asia (ESP32+LoRa modules) offer. TTGO has AFAIR recently released a super new board that allows this band.
If you haven't seen it, you may be interested in https://www.areg.org.au/archives/210334
You should check out Sceye, they're hiring and doing this. Unfortunately you have to live in the middle of the desert in New Mexico, otherwise it's a cool company
looks like a bunch of NEWBS.
(guessing github.com/NEWBS was taken)