Stratospheric Photography and Blog from a South African teen
Due to all the running around yesterday, I only got home at around 7pm, so was unable to start working on the parachute. This was fine, until I realized that I had forgotten the to buy the cord for the holding lines yesterday. To make matters worse, I found out that Denise in Bergvliet didn’t have the seam tape that I needed, so I would have to buy that as well. So due to bad planning, yesterday was a total disaster. Continue reading “Parachute Beginnings”
This morning I contacted The Cottage Shop, which is a tailor shop in Bergvliet, run from home by the owner, Denise. I explained my situation, that I wanted to make a parachute, and she said I could bring the stuff around today for her to see. Knowing that I still needed to acquire 90% of the items needed to construct said parachute, asked if tomorrow morning would be available, so I have enough time to buy everything and cut out the material. Denise said that was fine and she’d see me tomorrow. Continue reading “Run Around”
Over the past two days, I have been trying to work on my journal as much as I can, as I am falling behind with the amount of content that I am trying to capture. I still need to get my website up, I need to start on my research project, I need to start planning the future launches and assigning objectives to them, I need to try and further publicize my Indiegogo campaign, and on top of all that, I need to learn how to build a parachute and then actually build one. Sigh. Continue reading “Soft Landings”
Today while I was typing away at my journal, my dad started something behind my back (I mean he sits behind me, so it couldn’t have happened any other way). When I took a break, he showed me what he had been working on: a new tracking solution. Based on the experience we had with the launch yesterday and how the laptop almost died before we’d even reached the N2, we decided that it would be best to find alternate methods of using the Radiosondes that didn’t require the Laptop until it was absolutely necessary. Continue reading “A New Approach”
My dad and I arrived at Intermet at 11am with our box, the laptop, our cameras, a GoPro setup in the car and some duct tape ready for mission 1. After doing a quick vlog it was time to get everything set up inside. We met Michael and got straight to work on the tracking software, as this was the first time we were seeing if it actually worked on real data or not. Continue reading “Mission 1: Operation Sandfly”
Something else was completed today, aside from building software to interface with Google Earth and tracking the balloon in virtual 3D space in real time: I went live on my Indiegogo campaign.
After getting the reply from HotWired, saying that the box would cost about R2000 to make, I decided it was time to start a crowed funding campaign which could hopefully earn something. Without having any previous experience with running a campaign, I dived right in and see where the process would take me. After my previous research on the different crowdfunding platforms, I knew that Indiegogo would be the best option, so I headed over to their site and clicked “Start a campaign”. This took me to an option page to choose between a project or a cause. Since this is a project that I am working on, and not a charity, I clicked up fundraiser and continued. Continue reading “Indiegogo”
Tomorrow is the first launch that we are going to try and track, and I have been putting off building a way to visually track the balloon in 3D on my laptop. However with only hours to go before its time to rest the eyeballs, I thought it might be a good time to get started. Continue reading “Hacking Google (Not Really)”
I received a reply from the manager at HotWired just now. The email said:
“Hi Joseph,
Unfortunately the intricacy and amount of work needed does not make this something we can do for a minimal budget, this is about a R2000 job.”
When I first started thinking about the housing, I thought it was going to be a quick and easy process of simply buying the Polystyrene, placing the cameras inside, cutting some holes for the lenses and then duct-taping it closed. However, after the apparent parachute failure of the first test sounding I observed, I gave the box a bit more thought as it was essentially the protector of my entire project…
Today I started designing the housing for my cameras in SketchUp. However, I got slightly sidetracked and ended up researching the history of the camera instead. No matter.
While trying to calculate the angle of the field of view, so that I could cut out a conical hole in the side of the box as opposed to a cylindrical one, which would allow for total stability while maintaining complete viewing angle, I found out some interesting things about cameras that I didn’t know before. Continue reading “A Short History On Cameras”