Saturday, August 6, 2011

Supplies

We are currently researching the best way to communicate with the weather balloon. We were utilizing cell phone technology for our first prototypes but it will not be enough for our next launch. The possibilities that we are looking at is more complicated but it involves using a small version of a computer motherboard, radio signal, gps chip, digital camera designed to stream and put out a low quality video while recording on a chip with HD video "hopefully recoverable but if not we will have the low quality streaming video." The power consumption is significantly higher than our prototypes before but we will have the ability to record much more information than before while streaming video. This system will also be able to preform many more technical operations and will allow us to accomplish other tasks such as attaining equilibrium for a sustained period of time. 

One of the more technical goals we have is to attain pro-longed equilibrium while controlling the elevation of the balloon. This is possible in a few different ways but the best way is to control the water weight of a type of ballast tank. By condensing water we can control the weight of the balloon and therefore control the height. We are still working on the best way to condense water with little to no energy consumption. Other things that would work is to have pre-loaded weight on the balloon that we can release as the balloons loose their ability to lift, "such as releasing small lead weights." This will not be nearly as controllable as the ability to add weight to the balloons and if one mistake is made and the balloon keeps to increase in elevation the project would fail when the balloon would eventually burst.