The Balloon Plan

    There have been several amateur high altitude weather balloon launches in the past few years. In the U.S. the most famous is probably the $149 MIT balloon. Most of the projects are just interested in getting pictures and the thrill of finding the payload once it comes back down. I've decided to spend a good amount of money, collect some reliable pressure and temperature data, and of course get some of those beautiful high altitude pictures. If everything goes well with this launch I may attempt to break the unmanned balloon altitude record of 51.82 km. This balloon should reach about 34 km (112,000 feet or so).

The Components:

• Communication by a Telit GM862 cellular module and a custom made directional antenna
• GPS tracking by a GS407 receiver with the u-blox chipset (this is good to 50 km with the right dymanic platform setting programmed)
• Temperature and pressure data from a Honeywell IPT module (it's expensive, but it's one of a few modules that can read the low pressures at high altitudes)
• Heading and acceleration data from a VectorNav VN-100 module (this is just a nice to have thing since the GPS will also give a heading and it's quite expensive)
• Data logging in SD memory cards using the FAT32 file system for easy reading on a computer
  
• Processing done by Atmel AVR micros with Micromega uM-FPU v3.1 co-processors (the co-processors handle complex math and also have NMEA sentence parsers to make the GPS and VN-100 easy to handle)
• Undecided on the specific camera right now, but there will probably be multiple cameras to capture every angle
• DC motor and weighted disk to act as a gyro stabilizer that prevents the payload from spinning during flight
• LiPo batteries of course
• Kaymont cold weather balloon (size to be determined based on the weight of my finished payload)