As many have noticed, I've sort of fallen by the wayside as far as building and flying rockets have been concerned. I have a house I'm remodeling which pretty much satisfies my urge for building things, not to mention my whitewater dory project which takes care of my need to mix epoxy and lay up glass, carbon and Kevlar. However, it doesn't get my tech urges satisfied.
I'm working on the design of a Cubesat - Arduino and Raspberry Pi powered. What I have in mind is a combined project. A large rocket with serious altitude capability plus a helium balloon to provide a launching platform to test a Cubesat I'm hoping to get kicked out the door of one of Elon Musk's Falcon 9 Heavy test launches. Electronics and balloon geeks should contact me about this since I plan on the full suite of environmental sensors, cameras, and telemetry. Interested folks with real skills in electronics, microcontroller software and high altitude balloons should contact me via PM.
General idea is to send a CubeSat package aloft in a major project from a site like Black Rock. At apogee, the rocket would fill and deploy a largish helium balloon with the Cubesat as the payload.
Warren
An alternative would be to build a rockoon... a helium balloon launched launch pad for something serious - at least 6" in diameter and O or P powered. The idea is to break the helium balloon altitude record and then test the Cubesat.
These guys have room occasionally for some extra payload.
What altitude are you looking at? Why not just float up there with a balloon?
Edward
Warren, A couple weeks ago I assisted with this program http://s4.sonoma.edu/?page_id=151 although your projrct is much bigger..you might find some usefullinfo in the hardware or software sections.
Tony
Check out the BeagleBone Black, or the STMicro discovery platforms. The latter is $12, has 9 axes of inertial/magnetic sensors built in, and probably has all the computing power you need, with a 72 MHz Arm processor. If you need more computing power, the $45 BeagleBone Black runs at 1.2 GHz and has better/more direct interfaces available to connect to other parts of your project than the Raspberry Pi, which was really designed more as a low-cost linux desktop code development platform.
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