Another weather balloon astronaut - This time with a Raspberry Pi camera

GPS · May 28, 2013

Back in March I built a lightweight Raspberry Pi tracker comprising a model A Pi and a pre-production Pi camera built into a foam replica of the Raspberry Pi logo:

The aim was to send images from higher than my record of just under 40km, so the tracker was pretty much as light as I could make it. A launch was planned in April but but the wind predictions back then were poor for such a flight with a “landing” out to sea. That was the flight with Eben and Liz from the Raspberry Pi foundation, so rather than lose a precious slot in their over-full diaries I decided to launch a “floater” which was eventually lost over Switzerland and is probably still in hiding somewhere in France. For that I made a more suitable payload box, keeping the original for a later date.

That was a great flight with, as far as I know, the only live images sent from a flight of that type. It was also the first flight to use the new Raspberry Pi camera, and it got some good images though overall the success rate was much lower than I hoped for. Part of the reason was the solid white cloud cover which makes exposure very difficult, but also I didn’t realise that the camera was defaulting to spot metering which is the worst of all possible options for the challenging lighting conditions when the balloon is high. Spot metering basically makes the centre part of the image a certain luminance, which means that if it’s pointing at the blackness of space that turns grey whilst anything else in the image whites out. There are always going to be some useless images during a balloon flight, unless the camera is “aimed”, but on that flight almost all the downloaded images were poor (and that’s despite the on-board software selecting the better ones!).

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Source - Dave Akerman:
http://www.daveakerman.com/?p=1154

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Another weather balloon astronaut - This time with a Raspberry Pi camera

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Another weather balloon astronaut - This time with a Raspberry Pi camera

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