After having an extremely productive day on January 18th, I had a thought: What if every day were January 18th? Well, at the push of a button, now it can!

The button, switch, and display are wired to an Arduino.  The Arduino communicates with a python script running on the router, which controls a Squid3 proxy blacklist.  In SOPA mode, the whole of the internet is my oyster.  In NOPA mode, however, distracting websites like reddit, hacker news, and hackaday are blocked.  This isn’t very useful without a great deal of self control, however.  In weaker instances, nuclear mode must be employed.  Turn the key switch and press the button and all distracting sites are blocked for one hour.  The only recourse is to restart the router, but the router requires 15 minutes to restart, blocking the entirety of the web for the duration.  Overriding nuclear mode is not appealing.

All code is posted online at https://github.com/Zuph/SOPA-Box

A video demonstration and more pictures of construction lie below the break.

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Signup at EventBrite http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2562787366

Looking up in flight at balloon, vent valve and cutdown device

Hi All, the flight of the SuperPressure Initiated Termination Balloon Flight 1 was successful as far as we can tell so far.  We don’t know for sure because we haven’t gotten the SD cards that hold the video and science data on them.  Technical results as they come in over the next week will be posted on our wiki site, here.

With just skeleton assembly, launch and mission control crews preparations for this flight had to be less organized than we’ve done in the past for SpeedBall flight attempts.  We allowed for that by targeting an early launch time, with plenty of daylight left for schedule slip.

The massive zero pressure balloon was launched from SpacePort Indiana around 3:30 PM EST, by having the payload support crew run with the wind as soon as they released the balloon, allowing the balloon to rise straight up as it lifted each payload.

The balloon landed about 1.5 hours later on a family’s home in Miamisburg OH and was recovered shortly after.  The family made a youtube video of the balloon on the house!

Thanks to all who helped!   Some science observations follow.  The three pics above were emailed to us by the recovery crew in Ohio.   More pics available on Flickr here.

Science objectives and observations thus far (not final yet):

Rotation rate of balloon envelope: Observed a rate of ~10 revolutions per minute in the first 30 seconds of flight before cloud entry.  This may not be solely due to the asymmetric balloon shape, as the inversion rope was seen to have been bearing a part of the load in the flight videos.  It should have been loose and not bearing load.  Bearing the load would cause it to tip the balloon over slightly, and may exaggerate the aerodynamic asymmetry.  This unplanned rope tension may have invalidated the experiment.  Likely caused by simple miscalculation of required length.

Cutdown inversion method performance: The cutdown was set to a 61 minute timer.  All that is really known about the performance is that the cutdown did fire as designed, as seen in the recovery video.  It also did not simply rip the top off the balloon, which was one theorized possibility.  The action of the balloon inversion is unknown until we get the onboard video.

Vent valve performance: The performance of the vent can’t be determined until we see how the balloon inverted from the video.  The helium did not completely empty from the balloon, as seen in the recovery videro but that may not be because of vent failure.

Burst pressure measurement: Unknown until we get the data cards back.  Burst appeared to occur just a few minutes before cutdown, based on radio telemetry of altitude, but that was not clear.

Altitude vs. Time Chart Small with Climb Rate Color

Presentation:

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dchf63vz_7csgm8kgn

Tutorials:

Setting up a basic home network – Windows XP
http://www.worldstart.com/set-up-a-simple-network/

Learn soldering and basic Arduino programming in this workshop. The cost of this workshop also covers the materials cost for a freeduino microcontroller kit. Your assembled Freeduino is yours to keep! Use the vast open resources of the Arduino community to come up with your own electronic applications. This workshop is intended to teach you necessary skills for further exploration in the world of Arduino.

Limited Seating!

More information and registration here!

Slides from presentation and Source Paper Citations in text format

Now, background info to get you up to speed on the state of amateur superpressure:

This type of balloon has the potential to stay in the air for extremely long times, much longer than the 3 days flight estimated for the White Star’s trans-atlantic ‘zero-pressure’ balloons.

Superpressure is merely the condition where the gas inside the balloon is pressurized higher than the air pressure outside of the balloon. This can only happen with a balloon that doesn’t swell up like rubber nor can it be allowed to burst. Practically, you need a super strong plastic bubble.

Mylar is very strong, so Mylar foil (polyester) balloons from parties have been tried many times. Much math has gone into trying to calculate just the right lift and weight are needed to make the balloons pressurize and achieve level flight. Unlike the success in making and using ‘zero-pressure’ balloons, amateurs have had little, if any success making and using superpressures. The goal is a level float that lasts day and night, without needing to drop ballast.

Most flights seem to rise and simply burst, or more rarely, achieve float, but sink to the ground at sunset. I’ve taken the time to begin researching publicly available science research papers from the wonderfully open, various US meteorological journals. What follows in the presentation, is a summary of the things I’ve found that might explain why it isn’t working, and how we can make it work.

Here’s a link to the rest of the presentations on video.

UPDATE: Attendance registration is now full.

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2001740259

LVL1, KSTC, the Louisville Metro Inventors Council and Enterprise Corp are joining forces like a techno-entrepreneurial Justice League to teach makers how to make money, and maybe make Louisville more awesome in the process. From Tinkering to Commercialization – A “How To” Guide is a workshop set up for hardware hackers and inventors that teaches the ins and outs of bootstrapping and commercializing your designs for fun and profit.

Attendees will be introduced to the basics of how to take one’s projects from the garage to commercialization. Speakers will include Tendai Charasika of GLI’s EnterpriseCorp, Alex Frommeyer of Louisville Metro Inventors Council, and Ben Jennings of the Kentucky Science & Technology Corporation (KSTC). This will be a presentation and Q&A, with an emphasis on prototype manufacturing.