I’ve been thinking a lot about what Rian said. I need to find a way to retrieve my camera. I thought about using a drone, or a glider chassis, but the former cannot hold the weight and the latter is too heavy. Other high altitude balloonists have put parachutes on their housing and then tracked its fall and driven to its set down location. However, their launches were in areas that were completely flat, in other words not Cape Town. So I have come up with a design, which turns the camera rig into a housing and a glider. It works similar to Elon Musk’s Falcon rockets: it uses fins to guide the rig back to where it needs to go by directing airflow through the grids and using accelerometers and GPS to tell the fins how to go.
This will be very complicated and expensive. I will probably have to find many different mentors for just this aspect alone.
I will speak to Michael at Intermet Africa first though, and see what he has to say.
I am doubtful of this ever working, as there are aspects that were overlooked, such as heating, radiation, battery, weight, and the cost and effort needed. If I had more time and expertise I think I may have been able to pull it off, but I don’t, so I think I will bench the idea for now, as this is an entire project all on its own.
(The JavaScript 360 spin on this site is created by Magic 360)
I am rather going to scale down. I will start with the basics, as I have been overthinking this too much. Start small, then improve and increase. So that’s what I’ll do. I will go back to basics and then build up from there.
On a side note, drama rehearsals are becoming more intense and require more mental capacity than last month, so I will be taking a step back from my project for the next few months.
