Daniel Carvalho, Guilherme Aresta and Miguel Ferreira all from Portugal are finalists and amongst the 10 best groups in Europe, Africa and Middle East. If they pass this phase, they’ll go to Washington and their experience idea may go all the way the International Space Station.

So, what are you waiting for? Go and vote for the “Yeast-Powered Space Travel” entry now.

“G-Form, a company well known for delivering the most extreme electronics cases and athletic pads, launched an iPad clad solely in the company’s 6oz Extreme Edge case into space and then let it free-fall back to Earth.”

Check the video here

Early this year we submitted what seemed a very unlikely scenario: a panel proposal to speak at SXSW 2012.

SXSW Interactive takes place in Austin, Texas US and is currently one of largest conferences for creators and entrepreneurs in the world, taking the city down for five incredibly non-stop frenetic days featuring hundreds of panels ranging from themes like the web, internet, science, arts and others. More than 14.000 participants joined in last year.

Well, to our surprise, we were accepted and invited to speak at SXSW 2012 about our Portuguese Near Space project. We feel immensely proud and honored for this.

The team has decided to accept the invitation so expect us at the Driskill Hotel in March. We hope to travel with some of our gear and show it off to you and we’ll certainly prepare the best presentation of the project we can, including the juicy bits of what we’ve learned for the last year and a half.

Also, we’re wondering about the chance to launch a Spacebits 7 flight right from Austin during that week but further contacts with local volunteers are required before we can confirm this. We’re working on it.

If you’re going to be at SXSW next year, don’t forget to join us, otherwise stay tuned with our blog, we’ll keep in touch as much as we can.

Our new website is up.

You can expect lots of new content here for the next weeks. Some of our most technical pages are a bit outdated and we’ll be updating them with the latest information and learnings.

Also, we’ve decided that we’ll be using this Blog as a tool to promote all things amateur near space projects so expect the occasional post about the latest cool project we found that inspired us.

Hope you like it! Stay tuned.

Spacebits 6 took place on the 26th of June at Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain in Portugal. The spot was chosen after a presentation at TEDxCovilhã. It has been almost 9 months since our last flight and there was nostalgia in the air so we had to do it.

We arrived Friday at the Serra da Estrela chalets and started to unpack and prepare the Spacebits payload. In the past, we had done five flights, and recovered all of them, but we never had a perfect flight. Between software bugs, cameras that stopped working and many other small problems, we collected a list of DOs & DON‘Ts. With two days ahead of us there was enough time to solve them all and to improve the design. We worked hard to cover and improve every failure scenario that we thought. But it seems it wasn’t enough. Read ahead.

With so much effort put in the project, we had designed Spacebits keeping in mind that if anything happened to the main board we would be loosing a few thousand euros into the wild. So again we worked to improve the failsafe module as much as we could. It has been proven invaluable in other flights, Fernando Afonso and Filipe Varela started to check the module and test it thoroughly.

Taking great (and new) pictures of the earth was a major goal for flight 6, but we also wanted to track the flight in real-time. Celso Martinho, our fearless leader, developed a web application based on SAPO Maps that would show the position and also some sensor information on the web. We had test it already with success but it needed a few tweaks.

There was also applets for the iPhone and iPad developed by Filipe Varela. This is handy but you need to have 3G coverage, which is not always the case. Nevertheless, it is an invaluable add-on.

There where also some work to do on the main board, where data is collected, recorded and sent to our base station. The external temperature sensor had to be replaced and all the sensors were carefully tested. With the rest of the team happy to work inside, Filipe Valpereiro headed into the sun, testing the sensors and checking the GPS signal. After a few minutes in the sun his monitor reported a 48º measured with the external sensor. It was really hot …

Celso invited everyone to join in our mailing list to improve the project. There where some requests in the mailing list for an Android version and Miguel Duarte coded one just in time for Spacebits #6.

It was also a great opportunity to improve our ground station and Delfim Machado, along with some help from the SAPO Mobile team, worked on a app to receive data from the HAB and stream it to our server. In the past we had a laptop with a 3G connection to stream data into the web. But there was not always 3G signal while driving into the country.

This time we had the perfect solution. Serra da Estrela is the highest place in Portugal and we could just leave one antenna there, pointing into the direction where we expected the ballon to fall. In a few ours, Delfim and Celso got a XBee radio connected to the SAPO A5, an Android based cell phone, and a working app. And it fitted perfectly in the plastic enclosure that Celso bought the day before. Late at night everything was ready, just in time to another TO-DO item: get some good sleep. We learned that the hard way!

Sunday started shinny and there was another TO-DO item: ask the caffe manager to allow us to place our secret ground station and YAGI antenna in the terrace. We had line of sight from the terrace into the spot where the ballon was predicted to fall, near Castro Daire. We turned the main board and immediately everyone received an SMS with the ballon coordinates.

Filipe Valpereiro configured the radios to work in broadcast mode and Delfim assembled another SAPO A5 ground station to go in the car. Just in case someone might try to mess with our YAGI antenna and leave us in the dark. At this moment the expectations where high, and we started to gather around the cars to unpack the material and prepare the balloon.

We had rented  a 7 person van, filled with hand bags, computers,  food and 5000L of compressed Helium. Not the kind of luggage  you want to carry around in a car. Living dangerously.

Celso instructed all the attendees to take some care before handling the balloon. There was a lot of wind that day, as expected and we needed a lot of hands to help us secure the 3 meters wide balloon until it’s full. It wasn’t easy. Everyone took extra precautions not to wear any sharp objects, wedding rings included!

After some ground work we started to pump the helium into the ballon, very slowly. It takes about an hour to fill the balloon. If you do it faster the helium can freeze and damage latex rubber. There was some wind, but we got plenty of time, and patience.

Don’t panic.

We have enough hands to help.

Meanwhile, Fernando and Filipe inspected the payload and added the reward-if-found sign. As silly as it sounds, it helped us to recover our payload in our second flight, found in a beach near Cádiz, Spain, one week after we lost it. Name, phone, email and address should be enough.

It was time to turn on the GoPro camera. Very light, easy to operate, water proof enclosure available, and it can shot 1080p. This is a must have piece, we only wish they could have a model with swappable lens. We had no time to fully dehydrate the camera and the enclosure. This turned out to be a problem later on. During the flight, the camera crossed colder layers of the atmosphere and the lens got some condensation. Not critical, but some of footage got blurred.

With the balloon filled, it was time to measure the lift force. Fernando crafted a weight mechanism with a dynamometer attached to a wood board and some solid concrete weights. With the ballon secured to a nylon rope it was easy to measure the lift force. We should patent this, works great to calculate the amount of Helium needed for each flight.

It’s a simple and elegant solution, release the attached balloon and with a simple dynamometer you can measure the lift force. We got a few measurements but we pumped a few more liters of Helium, to account for the wind force. Better safe then sorry.

Countdown: 3, 2, 1 … GO

Within a few seconds the balloon flew hundreds of meters above our head. Now the hunt begins, we packed up everything, and rushed into the car to get some data from our Android based ground station.

But unfortunately we had no data. No radio signal, no GPS, nothing. The balloon climbed silently,  we pointed the car antenna to it to get some data, but it was hopeless. The on-ground antenna got no data either. Something wen’t terribly wrong, again.

We suspected that the main board switch had been turned off, maybe by a near cable when closing the box. In the rush, no one remembered to test the radio comms after the box was closed and sealed. A simple procedure that could have saved us from failing again. The flight predictor pointed Castro Daire as the most probable landing spot, so the team moved on.

At this moment we were hoping that the balloon would crash in a GSM covered area. The failsafe module is programmed to send an SMS with the last known coordinates as soon as it gets GSM coverage (that is, near the ground). It helped us to recover our first balloon, and we were hoping that the module would work again, but things weren’t looking good, the payload could land in an area with no GSM coverage as this region of the country has lots of mountains and desert areas.

After a few hours driving and burning the car tires, we went to Castro Daire. Our flight simulations showed this to be the most likely spot for the crash. We stopped for a quick snack and a brief team meeting waiting for the magic SMS message to arrive. Then it happened. Lunch was abruptly interrupted and our phones started to vibrate, Spacebits #6 had landed and the failsafe module save it again. We couldn’t believe it.

In less than two hours we recovered the balloon. Most of the people that joined for the hunt were using Google based maps clients to find the balloon. We discovered later that Google Maps API rounded the provided GPS coordinats position to the nearest existing route leaving us wandering the wrong spots for more than one hour. Luckily, Rafael and his wife had a Garmin GPS, and we had some exeperienced geo-cachers with us, and they were able to locate the payload in no time. Fernando Afonso’s idea to add a buzzer to the payload box was also a great one. It helped the hunters a lot because their could hear the beeps in the wild.

After opening the box we found the problem. As predicted the on/off switch was indeed OFF. One of the cable add turned it off while closing the box at launch. So much for failure scenarios and hard work. Shortly after being turned on, the radio started to transmit, and our ground station at Serra da Estrela (>80Km distance) started to receive data. In a few seconds we where able to see data in the Spacebits website as well. If the switch had been stayed on, we are pretty sure we would have our first perfect flight with  near 100% live data being received by the ground station. Bah.

Time for a group photo and prepare to return home.

Based on the ascent velocity and the amount of video recorded we estimate that the ballon reached 38Km high. At this height, you can see the round shape of the Earth, which appears more dramatic because of the GoPro fish eye lenses.

You can also see part of the parachute in the left corner, moments before opening. It takes approximately 30 minutes for the payload to return into the Earth.

It was a great weekend, full of surprises, work and fun. And above all, it is a great way to share knowledge, experience real life problems and meet new people. Thank’s to everyone who showed up at Serra da Estrela, awesome friendly helpful people. Covilhã for the win!

Now enjoy the video of Spacebit 6 we prepared. Thanks to everyone who provided us with media and footage to edit this.

Here’s and H.264 friendly version of the video for Android/iOS users.

We are planning Spacebits 7 already, stay tuned.

Photo gallery from Spacebits 6

12►

No dia 26 de Junho vamos fazer mais um voo Spacebits, o nosso sexto. E desta vez, tendo em conta que temos até à data 100% de taxa de sucesso com cinco voo feitos, decidimos ir “extreme” e aumentar drasticamente a dificuldade da tarefa de recuperação do payload. Como tal escolhemos um local mítico de Portugal para o fazer: na Serra da Estrela no seu ponto mais alto, a Torre.

Tal como foi prometido na TEDxCovilhã e tal como fizemos no nosso épico primeiro voo em Castro Verde vimos por aqui convidar-vos a juntarem-se a nós nesse dia e participarem activamente na parte mais divertida da empreitada, no lançamento e na caça do Payload.

Quem já participou sabe como é, divertimento e adrenalina puros, não precisamos de vos cativar. Para os restantes recomendamos vivamente a leitura das nossas histórias dos voos #1, #2 e #3,4,5 para ficarem com uma ideia do que vos espera.

Assim sendo, convite feito, vamos aos detalhes.

Local de lançamento: Serra da Estrela, Torre.

Data: 26 de Junho de 2011, às 11h.

Coordenadas GPS: 40.321161,-7.613666

O plano é lançar o balão, perseguir o mesmo, recuperar o payload, voltar à Torre, celebrar.

Como fazer para participar?

Envia um email para spacebits@sapo.pt com o teu nome e o teu contacto telefónico. Este email será incluido numa lista que nós usaremos para enviar outras informações. O contacto telefónico servirá para enviar as coordenadas do balão durante o voo.

O que é necessário levar?

Este é o kit básico de sobrevivência a uma caça do Spacebits:

• Um carro para a perseguição do balão. Quando mais de guerra for o carro melhor, pode dar-se a necessidade de ter que andar por caminhos de terra ou estradas em más condições. Não esquecer de encher o depósito.
• Muita água e comida leve. Barras de energia, fruta, outros.
• Um inversor de 12/220V para ligar ao isqueiro do carro dá imenso jeito. São baratos e podem-se comprar no AKI. A equipa do Spacebits vai levar alguns para emprestar.
• Um GPS ou equipamento de navegação semelhante. Deve permitir a introdução manual das coordenadas de lat/lon (alguns equipamentos não o permitem).
• Um telemóvel. Não é absolutamente necessário mas ter um plano de dados ajuda pois vamos ter algumas aplicações online para ajudar os caçadores. O fallback é receberem as coordenadas do balão por SMS, periodicamente, durante o voo. Um iPad com 3G é especialmente útil pelos mesmos motivos.
• Roupa fresca, chapéus, protector solar.
• Um ou mais pares de walkie talkies ajudam na comunicação da equipa.
• Câmaras fotográficas e/ou de filmar são bem vindas para registar a aventura.

Há uma mailing-list preparada para os participantes. Aquivo aqui. Inscrição aqui.

Como é que acompanho a viagem do balão e o persigo?

Cada grupo receberá as coordenadas com a latitude e longitude do balão através de mensagens de SMS no seu telemóvel de contacto, em tempo real, periodicamente, durante toda a viagem do mesmo e enquanto tivermos comunicação com o sistema.

Adicionalmente a equipa do Spacebits vai disponibilizar ferramentas online e aplicações Mobile.

O que fazer quando recuperar o payload?

A equipa que recuperar o payload deve informar imediatamente a organização, que se encarregará de informar todos os participantes e regressar ao ponto de encontro, na Torre, para devolver o equipamento, que nos permitirá recuperar os dados recolhidos, as fotos e os videos da viagem até ao limite da estratosfera.

Preciso de possuir algum skill especial?

Não. Boa disposição, energia e espírito aventureiro bastam. Mas se fores alpinista, montanhista, tiveres um Jipe ou uma moto4, tendo em conta o local, pode dar jeito :)

Notas finais

O Spacebits é um projecto amador realizado por um grupo de amigos que partilham uma visão comum: desafiar o que parece impossível, construir coisas fantásticas, ultrapassar as barreiras, partilhar as suas experiência, e divertirem-se à brava. Especialmente a última. E é com este mesmo espírito que temos o maior prazer em vos convidar.

Se tiverem questões adicionais, coloquem-nas na discussão deste artigo mais abaixo.

It took us a few weeks to put everything together. We began by inviting every geek and hacker at SAPO.PT to join the team and work with us to accomplish our mission. The first two weeks were dedicated to a few sessions to explain all our learnings from Spacebits 1 and 2 flights to all our new team members. Soon after, everyone was working hard with us. We got a lot of great feedback on how to improve our payload aerodynamics, calculate the right amount of helium for each balloon, predict the crash spots, making the “todo” lists, etc. It was like having all the best city physicians, mechanics and engineers working with you. Dream team.

With them, and our extensive experience on failure which we got from our previous flights, we improved pretty much everything to close perfection. Payload boxes were better and lighter and batteries were soldered instead of socketed like the RC cars pros do, we switched to more reliable (and programmable) GPS chips, we’ve done our own PCB design for the main computers instead of using prototype boards, just to name a few.

We used to the same IXUS100 Canon cameras loaded with CHDK and 16Gb SD cards, bought 8 of them, and wired them with special power cables so that they’d use the main battery instead of the weaker standard ones. Also, we’ve experimented with a GoPRO camera for the first time in one of the balloons.

For the launch procedure, we’ve finally built a special structure with heavy weights, a dynamometer and air tubes and valves to aid us with the helium calculations and filling, and hold the balloons before they’re launched.

We’ve also bought lots of walkie talkies, yagi antennas for the ground stations, car dc/ac inverters and a ton of L91 energizer batteries.

The occasion would be the 15th anniversary celebration and team event of SAPO.PT, in a farm at Beja, Portugal.

And so the day arrived. We successfully launched and recovered 3 HABs in one shot, it was an intense and utterly fun day. This had to be a record of some sort.

We won’t go into lengthy descriptions, you can read our posts from Spacebits 1 or Spacebits 2 if you’re looking for long stories.

For the better, we’ve made this awesome video of the whole thing, using footage from a lot of people on the ground and the on-board cameras from the balloons. We think you’ll like it.

Here’s a H264 mobile friendly link for the video.

On the 11th of August we quietly launched the Spacebits 2 balloon, it was planned since our first flight to correct the problems we had and prove that our initial design worked. In case you don’t remember, althoughSpacebits 1 was a success, we had major last minute troubles with the main computer which included the telemetry and the main radio (read the story here for details if you haven’t yet).

So we gathered the team at Fernando’s house at Lagos on the 10th to get everything ready for the Spacebits 2 launch. Until then we all had been working remotely on several tasks like buying new cameras, a good Yagi antenna and new and improved Xbee radios, getting authorizations from INAC, fixing lots of software problems and small hardware components and discussing procedures and new ideas. So one day should be enough to put everything together, we thought. (mistake #1)

Celso arrived at Fernando’s place in the morning. Both Filipes arrived just after lunch from Lisbon, carrying the (huge) Helium bottle with them in the car. Time passed by, a few snooker games and swimming pool dives later and eventually we managed to put the new radio up and running for tests. We fixed the equipment and the omnidirectional antenna at Fernando’s house rooftop and started the test transmission.

Filipe Valpereiro, trapped at the roof.

The plan was: Celso, Fernando and Filipe Varela would go for a drive in the car with the Yagi antenna on the front window and the Macbook laptop and the other Xbee in the back and check on how far could they receive the packets. A few rounds around Lagos with the car and we were positively impressed with the results, we had received xml packets at all locations, but from one minute to the other it just stopped working. (mistake #2) We went home, fixed a bad solder on the Xbee receiver connector and went back to the road for take two.

It was then around 20h30, night. That time we went far to the Serra de Monchique, it’s a 46km car ride to the top of a mountain where you can see Fernando’s house at Lagos, approximately 30km if you use a straight line. When we finally got there we had a very good surprise, we were receiving the xml packets in perfect conditions, we didn’t even had to point the Yaggi to the transmitter spot with much precision, amazing we said.

So we were pretty confident that the new radio and antennas would kick ass. Plus the software bits had been ironed out too. There were still some troubles with the GPS chip of the main board, it seemed to take a few minutes to boot up, find the satellites and start working, but Filipe Varela and Valpereiro would handle and fix that through the night.

Celso checked the upper winds forecast online for the next day, it looked very good. Mild southeast winds. He tweets “there’s a good chance we’ll recover the balloon in Spain tomorrow” at the @flyspacebits account just out of fun, not really believing it.

Time flew, and suddenly It was 7am, Fernando was sleeping a few minutes at the couch, Celso went home for a 2 hours sleep and a bath, and both Filipes kept working (mistake #3).

Alright, sunshine, it was 11am, everybody was up and running. We finished the final details to close the payload box, new battery packs, a few hot glue drops here and there and strong plastic strips to hold the electronics together, cameras were ready too, INAC’s authorization papers, we load all the gear into the two cars and off we went to Castro Verde, the same location that we used for the Spacebits 1 flight. We made a pit stop at the first gas station and bought lots of water, coke and cookies for the road, it was going to be very hot that day (>35ªC).

By around 1pm we were finally at the launch spot.

Team unloading the heavy helium bottle

The day was extremely hot and there was some wind at the ground. The sky seemed clear, there were no clouds but it had a funny slightly browned color. The reason, we found later after investigating, was this: there was a huge cloud of dust traveling from the Sahara desert all the way to Portugal. There was this thin dust everywhere in the sky, it’s a rather strange phenomena we learned but not rare. We had noticed and commented amongst friends that 2 days before, when it rained, all the cars went covered with dirt, almost mud. Also reading the main Portuguese meteo forum looking for answers helped. See the impressive photo of the mega dust cloud arriving to Portugal 2 days before?

Cloud of dust approaching south of Portugal

So we unload all the gear from the cars, the usual stuff from Spacebits 1 and in 15mins we’re set. Two problems emerge: first, there’s an adaptor missing, the one that connects the Helium bottle to the balloon tube used to fill the balloon. Second, we completely forgot about the the amount of Helium calculations. (mistake #4)

The first problem was easy to fix on spot, the solution was… yes, duct tape, the best invention ever and the solution for every problem. It worked. The second problem was however a bit more difficult to solve in a hurry.

Duct tape fixes every problem in the world

Let’s go back in time to the day before the Spacebits 1 launch. On that glorious day someone joined the team to help us: our friend João Pedro. He’s also a uber-geek like us and during that day he focused solely and completely on the Helium calculations, browsing through all the other HAB projects on the Internet, reading all the theory and making a neat and nice spreadsheet where we would input the weight of the balloon and the payload and it would spit the weight of the counterweight object that we would use during the fill to get the correct amount of helium into the balloon. Except the radio & telemetry problems, the Spacebits 1 flight went so well in terms of physics that we underestimated the small details for the Spacebits 2.

Turns out that calculating the right amount of Helium is very important for any HAB flight. In fact it can completely determine the success or failure of the project. If you fill the balloon with too much Helium it will go up very fast, inflate quickier, and explode earlier than expected. If on the contrary, you fill it with less Helium, it will take a lot longer to go up, making it vulnerable to high altitude winds and very low temperatures, it wont reach the maximum altitude either, and ultimately increases the chances that you loose the HAB. Lets repeat: the right amount of Helium is very important (mistake #5).

So there we were, standing like four fouls doing the palm-face dance. Anyway, after a rather humiliating failed attempt to lift off Spacebits 2 we eventually filled up the balloon with enough Helium, turned everything on, made the basic ground tests, and the thing was launched. As soon as the balloon left ground we noticed that it was more windy than the first time causing the balloon to travel very fast horizontally.

First take. The balloon didn’t lift. Humiliating. Yes, that’s Fernando Afonso dying in laughter.

Back to the launch spot for Take 2.

We packed everything back into the two cars and the hunt began. Fernando Afonso took Filipe Valpereiro in one car with the iPad 3G and Celso, Filipe Varela and a friend took the other with the Yaggi antenna and the ground station hardware and software. Immediately, we started receiving xml packets with the telemetry data.

The onboard GPS was working great, as well as the radio, and we had full control of the payload coordinates. Everything looked great. We also found another mistake (#6), some of the units in the packets weren’t normalized. For instance, the altitude value would rotate each 6500 meters back to zero, which could easily be fixed with data post-processing but did cause us to be unaware of the exact altitude in real time.

The Yaggi antenna that we used to receive the data packets from the Balloon.

Quickly we found that the balloon was:

1. Ascending very slowly (this was due to the helium miss calculations, it should have a lot more helium for our payload weight)
2. It was traveling very fast (due to 1) to southeast (to Spain and Algarve).

We couldn’t keep up to the speed with our cars. Constantly calculating road directions while following the balloon wasn’t easy too (todo #1). Soon, we were into the torrid desert roads of the deep Alentejo/Algarve heading Spain and the more time passed the more distant the balloon was. At one time, we were getting packets from a distance of more than 80km. The only good news at this point was that the radio was working surprisingly well, we could easily pick the data packets in the air just by pointing the Yaggi antenna to the theoretical balloon position (todo #4), inside the car, while traveling, impressive (todo #3).

Two hours later something very stupid happened to us. I’d say it was the fail of the day. The night before we made a simple minor change to the website API by introducing a fallback condition in the code where the timestamp of the received radio packet would be the webserver’s time if the received packet wouldn’t carry a timestamp itself. Big mistake (#7 and #8).

It turned out that from time to time (specially at 80kms of distance) we got bad data packets in the air with garbled values. Also, we found later, the on-board realtime clock was (very) delayed, we forgot to set it at launch time (see mistake #4). So in practice we got a packet into the system which had a valid GPS coordinate but, because the radio timestamp was garbled, had the timestamp of the webserver, causing it to be the most recent valid coordinate for hours to the eyes of the client APIs. You know what means don’t you? Our iPhone/iPad apps, and the website itself, were telling us that the balloon had fallen in a valley near Spain (while in fact it was traveling to the sea of Spain at high speed). Here was a situation where having altitude measurements would have saved us.

We lost almost two hours due to this stupid bug until we realized something was wrong. I swear I thought I was going to die. We went into unpaved roads of all sorts, trespassing private properties (some of them advertising dangerous signs of wild life) until we finally got to the deep hot valley. Temperature was 45C! We had no sleep, were very tired, and had no proper lunch. As we climbed those torrid hills up and down, my heart started pumping to a scary and dangerous rate. Seriously dear readers, this was bad. On the other hand, “killed by a software bug” would give an excellent darwin award.

Team returning from the 45ºC hot valley, where they spent 2h looking for nothing.

Soon enough, after we fixed the API problem, we had a clear idea on where the balloon actually was. It was in the middle of the sea, near Vila Real de Santo Antonio, on the Spanish side, heading Cadiz. It had fallen in the water. By this time we were no longer receiving radio packets. Also the fallback GSM module couldn’t possibly work because we made yet another mistake: the SIM card had the roaming disabled so it wouldn’t work in Spain (mistake #9).

We drove all the way to VRSA and went straight to the coast guard office near the port. Had a chat with the captain, explained him the whole story and gave him the exact GPS location of the balloon. He smiled and told us: amazing story. If it was under Portuguese waters, we would take you on a speed boat and get the thing right now. Unfortunately it’s not, and we can’t go into Spanish waters, sorry (todo #5).

But we couldn’t give up so easily, not after what we went through. We went to the Spanish border and talked to the Police there. This time they didn’t find the story that funny, just said they couldn’t help, asked us for our contacts in case something would come up and waved us goodbye with a poker face.

We had no more options. It was night already so we called the day off and declared Spacebits officially dead. It was kind of a sad moment. In a way we were happy that we finally got the radio working and had the full telemetry log, but sad because we lost the payload due to our own new and apparently unimportant mistakes.

At the Portugal/Spain border, talking with the Spanish police.

During the ride back to Lagos, Filipe Varela was still in denial. Kept calling the fallback module’s phone number in the hope that it would ring, over and over. The day ended up with the team having a few burgers at the McDonalds. Boy, were we hungry.

Days passed by and the team was still discussing on what went wrong and what should be fixed for Spacebits 3 on the project’s mailing-list. Varela did an amazing job and normalized the received data (see mistake #6) on a spreadsheet, so we had pretty graphics and a clear notion of the Balloon’s rise and fall, now with altitude. And of course, it confirmed that it took a dive in the sea.

And then, 5 days later, when least expected something amazing happened. Celso got a phone call from Spain that went more or less like this:

• Hello, is this Celso?
• Er.. Yes?
• We have found your balloon!
• (silence)
• Hello?
• (unquotable exciting talk follows)

Unbelievable, the payload had been floating on the high sea for 5 days and finally gets to the shore, near Cadiz. Someone doing a walk at the beach finds the payload, reads the contacts and decides to call us. Two miracles here: first, I don’t usually answer unknown numbers at my cellphone. Second, we found later that our contacts could barely be read, a few more days and we couldn’t even be contacted (mistake #10).

So, after a few phone calls we agree on a 100€ reward and the finder sends our beloved balloon and payload through the mail. We got everything back by the 27th of August. The excitement in the room when the box was opened was huge. Of course the whole electronics and cameras were severely damaged and beyond repair, the batteries had exploded inside, possibly due to the salty water, and the mix of salt with acid had ruined everything.

But the big question was: are our 3 SD cards intact with data on them? (2 cards for both cameras, 1 card for the GPS and sensor’s data). While we waited for the box to arrive in the mail, we read about memory cards recovery. It seems that memory cards falling in the water is a pretty common thing these days. It turns out that memory cards are hermetically sealed by design (and tested against it during the QA process). All you need to do is to clean the contacts with alcohol (>95%), wash the cards with water to get the salt off and dry them well, and they should be ok.

All the 3 cards were OK indeed. We had the sensor’s logs intact and lots of great footage from above. Unfortunately, the vertical camera didn’t took any photos or videos for some reason, but the problem was CHDK related (todo #6).

Are we the luckiest guys or earth or what? Here’s a set of photos that speak for them selves:

Box arrives in the mail, from Spain.

Taking the mini SD card off the main board.

This Arduino Mega will have no more missions.

You can see what salt, water and battery acid did to our beloved payload box and electronics.

I don’t think this IXUS100 will work again.

Team and SAPO friends look at the data in the cards, for the first time.

Beyond repair.

And now some photos of the Spacebits 2 flight:

Flight starts. You can see the dust in the sky already.

See the cloud shades projected in the dust? That’s how dirty the sky was. Visibility to the ground was near zero.

Balloon approaches the sea.

Check the video of the flight. Remember the dust storm? You can clearly see it in the videos. Watch the shadow of the clouds in the dust. The footage isn’t near spectacular as the first flight.

Here’s the RAW data from the onboard mini SD card as well as the spreadsheet with the data post-processed and normalized.

• LOG file from the on-board computer
• Openoffice spreadsheet
• Excel spreadsheet

Spacebits 3, 4 and 5 are in the making right now. We just can’t stop doing this. Expect more news within a month or so. See you soon ;)

Comments on mistakes:

#1 – It wasn’t. We would need at least two days to complete everything, which led us to do some of the things in a hurry and have no sleep (again).

#2 – Make sure you solder everything nicely before you go on the road. Bad connections and little details can be a big deal.

#3 – Having no sleep when a big day that requires concentration and physical strength is ahead, is bad, very bad. Most of team members didn’t sleep more than 2-3 hours.

#4 – Do an extensive checklist ffs and review everything on the day before (related to #1 and #3)

#5 – Helium quantities calculations are critical to the success of the flight.

#6 – Normalize the data units and test the radio payload packets with real data before launch, otherwise you nay get in trouble and/or loose important data.

#7 – Don’t change structural stuff, like the API, on the night before the launch.

#8 – Make sure you prepare unit tests for everything by simulating a real flight with real data. Repeat those tests if you change anything. This is basic software development cycle best practices stuff.

#9 – Make sure the SIM cards have roaming enabled. Also, don’t use special operator numbers to send the SMS to, just use a regular +351 prefixed number. If possible, test your module under roaming conditions too.

#10 – The contacts sheet on the payload is very important. It can save it. Make sure you use good materials and protect the sheet with plastic for the case of water.

Todo list for Spacebits 3:

• We could automate the real time road directions calculations with the iPhone/iPad app.
• Also, the client apps on-ground should send their GPS coordinates to the website for future data correlation and analysis.
• Do not touch the main radio design. It works great.
• Client apps should use the built-in compass and tge GPS readings to aid us pointing the Yaggi antenna to the optimal position.
• If you’re going to send your balloon to the sea, make sure it’s Portuguese waters so you can get a free speed boat ride adventure included.
• CHDK is great but it isn’t exactly the most stable piece of software. It’s a hack. It caused us problems before with scripts stopping after the first round of photos. We should improve this and find a way for the camera to give us feedback at the launch spot. Also, we should look at other solutions, we’re buying a Go Pro camera to experiment with.

Gallery of Photos from Spacebits 2

12►

The 30th of May was a memorable day for all of us. After several months of planning, researching and developing our project, after countless hours of work, E-mails to the project list, conference calls, paperwork and authorizations, and 4 amazing weekend team meetings, we finally launched Spacebits 1. Our expectations were high, and so were our anxiety levels. We knew that we were ready to go, we did our best in testing out everything over the last weeks, but we also knew that we were dealing with an unpredictable system, and that was part of the fun too. In fact, what drove us from the beginning when we all started working on this mission was mainly that: fun. What a ride!

This is the very late report of the event, our first High Altitude Balloon launched in Portugal. What went good and bad, our conclusions and lessons learned and our plans for the future.

So here’s the untold story of the Spacebits 1 weekend, hope you enjoy it.

We went to Castro Verde on Friday and rented a few bungallows at the Castro Verde Camping Park (great place to visit, by the way), one for us to work on the project, and the others for family and friends.

By Saturday evening, everything looked really well, we had everything tested and working and most of the components were already assembled in the payload box, ready to go. Fernando Afonso and Filipe Varela went to Guia to buy a few L91 batteries and took the failsafe GSM/SMS module with them to field test it –  it worked flawlessly.

For a minute there, it seemed as if we were going to have everything ready by the end of the night, then have a good night’s sleep and launch the thing early in the morning. Yeah right. We had a good long dinner at Castro’s restaurant, and then headed back to our bungalow, then we realized that the devil is in the details and all those small things missing took in fact hours to complete.

Celso and Fernando Afonso went to sleep at around 5AM and both Filipes stayed up all night and went for the launch with no sleep at all.

8AM. everybody’s up. Reality check with the team, the good news is that everything seems to be ready and working. Celso takes the car near the bungalow and starts loading everything: Helium bottle, AC inverter, balloons, parachute, cameras, electronics and other tools, and the Spacebits payload. The weather looks great (lucky us), the phone starts ringing as many of our friends are arriving and asking for directions. Some press and TV arrive too.

By 9h45AM we leave the camping park in 3 cars and by 10h15AM we are parking them at the launch site. Not bad. The launch time was 11AM and we still had some time to set everything up.

We unload all the gear into a big floor blanket to protect the equipment from dust and rocks. It’s imperative that the balloon goes up as immaculate as possible. Team starts the preparations.

It’s 11AM, it’s time. Everyone gathers for the big moment: friends, family, press and TV, about 30 people drop by. For us it’s a crowd. One of the place neighbors comes by in his car and asks what’s going on in extreme curiosity. We explain, he smiles.

João Pedro gave us a hand too by previously calculating the Helium quantities so he’s now filling the balloon himself.

Fernando Afonso and Filipe Varela check and get the payload box ready, turn the failsafe module on, place the batteries. Celso turns on both cameras and starts the CHDK scripts.

But something is wrong. Filipe Valpereiro looks awfully stressed at the car with his Macbook connected the main computer’s Arduino. The main computer, which includes all the sensors’ logging, the main radio and the cut off controller, isn’t working properly. Freaking Murphy!

The sun is well up, it’s a gorgeous day, no clouds, no wind, and it’s very hot. Several persons brought their sun umbrellas and beach chairs to the place, anticipating the wait. Pedro Pinheiro arrives in its Prius and kindly opens the truck to find a cooler box filled with ice, beverages and beer for everyone to chill (thanks mate!).

Time keeps flying, João Pedro keeps holding the balloon now half filled (we’ve spent ~4500L of Helium). Valpereiro comes to the launch spot, still very stressed, puts the main computer inside the payload box and starts debugging the thing. No luck. Something is terribly wrong. Celso joins him with a sun umbrella and a good dose of rationale to balance things. Not only the main radio isn’t working but the sensors’ logger has problems too. Team starts discussing plan B scenarios.

To make things worse, there’s no 3G coverage at the launch spot so we can’t update our twitter account or the website and there is this crowd of users waiting online for the live transmission without any clue, jumping to conclusions paired with the #fail hashtag. Bad.

It’s 11h50. Despite the good looks, the team is devastated with the last minute problems but wants to launch the HAB. Both cameras are working fine and the failsafe module has proven for its robustness so there’s good chance we can recover the probe. We decide to move on and launch Spacebits 1 without the main radio. Low profile was the key here. Most of the people weren’t aware of our problems.

By 12:00 Spacebits 1 takes off. Cameras shooting photos in unison, crowd claps the team. We’re all filled with an immense sense of mission accomplished and we can’t hide our pride and egos, our adrenaline peaked, there’s this photo of us looking at the sky that says it all.

In 10 minutes the balloon gets out of sight. Now that sense of accomplishment is replaced by one of uncertainty and anguish. For the next two hours we won’t be able to do nothing but wait for one single SMS. In case you don’t remember, the failsafe module is now our only means of communication with the probe but as it depends on the GSM network, it only works at low altitude and with mobile network coverage. The last SMS we had was from take off, at 822 meters, and then it shut.

We pack up everything and decide to head to Castro Verde and have lunch with friends and family. After wandering the village for more than one hour seeking for a place to eat, we finally settle for a small traditional barbeque restaurant and order some food. Celso takes the Macbook out of the backpack (finally there’s 3G), updates the @flyspacebits twitter account and apologizes the online community for the lack of the live feed. He also looks at the SMS daemon running on the server hoping for some new data, but nothing. He also configures the broadcast program with the cell phone numbers of the geocaching guys that dropped by. Everyone wants to be informed of the crash site when it occurs, if it does.

It’s now 2h00 past the launch time. We start speculating on chaotic scenarios. There have been reports of less than 2h HAB flights on the web. João Pedro pulls its spreadsheet file and recalculates everything for the 5th time. Fernando Afonso swears that he’d seen “something” falling from the skies on the horizon, just 30 minutes after the launch. Our hopes and dreams start to fade away. Celso starts thinking about the motivational #fail speech.

At this point Celso can’t take his eyes off the SMS log on the server. We didn’t sleep well, didn’t eat a proper breakfast and couldn’t have lunch due to anxiety and social pressure.

And suddenly it happens, Celso jumps out of his chair, literally, and shouts: “Guys, Stop! We have just received one SMS from Spacebits 1!!!”. In a rush, 6 or 7 persons run away from the restaurant leaving the others behind. Celso calls Fernando Afonso on the phone, he is having lunch at another restaurant, and says “Dude, we just got lat/lon coordinates in a SMS!!”, he replies “Really??? Awn man… Let’s go, let’s go!!”. Our geocaching friends had received the SMS too as we’ve put their cell phone numbers in the broadcast list.

And so the hunt race begins. Castro Verde hadn’t seen so much action in a long time. The probe had fallen 30km from the launch spot, to southwest, in the mountain near Ourique. At least 5 groups in 5 cars left in a hurry. Celso took his VW Touran with Valpereiro, Fernando Afonso, the camera man from “Elemento Indesejado” and the half filled helium bottle jumping all over the truck. João Pedro went with Filipe Valpereiro and Delfim Machado in another car.

Our navigation tools took us to unpaved roads of all sorts but finally, after some trial and error attempts, we reached the crash site. It’s in the middle of nowhere but it’s reachable by walking. To our surprise, Isa and Nuno were already there at the crash spot (these geocaching guys are pros at finding stuff), respectfully waiting for us. We held the payload box in our hands, it was in great shape, no major damage. The signaling LED lights weren’t blinking though, something went fishy inside with the crash.

This is the spot where Spacebits 1 landed, 30 km from its launch position

Everything looks ok. The payload is intact.

Photo of the team. Mission acomplished all over our faces.

Moment of anxiety. Celso checks the memory cards to see if they have the photos and videos.

 

This is video (edited) of the Spacebits 1 flight. We have some photos too here.

 

Luckyiest people on earth

We found later, looking at the SMS logs, that we found the payload by miracle. The failsafe module only sent 4 SMS between just after he got network coverage during the last seconds of the fall and the crash event. When the payload crashed, several cables and electronic components got separated and the failsafe shut down and stopped sending coordinates. Had it been the case where the GSM card took more 30 seconds to sync with the network, or no network coverage was available (both cases likely to occur) and we probably would have never found Spacebits 1. Remember that we had no main radio.

Great footage found

When we returned to Castro Verde proudly holding the Spacebits 1 payload as a trophy, we carefully opened the box in extreme curiosity to find if the cameras had recorded anything. And yes they did, we found amazing videos and photos from above. Spacebits 1 was a success.

We found later that the cameras had shut before the flight’s peak altitude though. We estimate that the flight went up to 29km and the highest photo we have is about 22km. The reason was clear. They had shut before time because we stupidly wasted 1h of battery life in the ground while trying to fix the main computer and radio. Bummer.

No sensor’s data

Also, as expected, due to the main computer and radio problems we had, no sensors’ data was found in the microSD card on-board, including altitude, pressure, temperature, etc. Damn.

So here’s our balance of the Spacebits 1 flight:

What went good

• Failsafe module and client/server SMS software worked great and proved to be robust.
• Cameras scripts worked nicely. We may work on a few adjustments, most photos were overexposed for instance.
• Payload box
  • Materials
  • Suspension
  • Parachute
  • Balloon attachment
• Helium calculations and methods. We’ll share the formulas with you guys later.

What went bad

• Main radio and computer. DIdn’t work at the last minute. Had to be shut.
• Procedures
  • Cameras batteries. Mental note: the cameras will be turned on only when everything’s ready.
  • Helium filling too early. Mental note: Set the payload first, test everything, then fill up the balloon.
  • Helium bottle out of the car. You don’t want to hunting with a huge helium bottle bumping in you car’s truck.
  • Fill the car’s gas tank of the day before. Yes, we lost 15 minutes looking for a gas station.
• Cut off switch. Didn’t work because it depended on the main computer. We might want to rethink this. Yes, this means that Spacebits 1 fell to the ground with the pieces of the exploded balloon attached to the payload.
• 3G coverage on spot. Make sure you have 3G coverage at the spot where you’re launching the HAB otherwise you can’t use the Internet at all or update the website.
• Navigation software. Use a decent navigation software like TomTom to hunt the probe. Google Maps sucks at directions in remote areas, really.

Lessons learned

We learned a lot of lessons from Spacebits 1. Despite the normal and expected small improvements on robustness, software and electronics, we learned that we failed miserably at the procedures, especially the ones for the launch day. That’s something we’ll work harder for the next launches.

But there’s a lot of good news too. We learned a lot of theory with this project, we had to research a lot, read many articles and other HAB reports in order to prepare ourselves. We all learned a lot on electronics, materials, regulations, helium and gases, hacking and space.

All in all, now in retrospective Spacebits 1 was a huge success not because the main goal was accomplished but mainly because of the very important lessons we’ve learned from all the mistakes we did. We couldn’t easily learn about these errors on the Internet, you had to go through this invaluable experience first with all its risks.

Plans for the future

Boy do we have plans for the future. As you might expect, we’re completely hooked to this HAB thing. We’ll be launching other balloons in Portugal through 2010 and we’ll let you know about them soon. And before that there’s one important launch to be done: Spacebits 2. We need a stress free, low profile launch where the initial specs from Spacebits 1 actually work. We need to fix the main radio and computer problems, the procedure errors, and prove that the original plan works. And that’s what we’re about to do, real soon. So stay tuned everyone.

Thank you very much for your support. Special thanks to everyone who joined us on the 30th of May, you are all great friends. Thanks Isa, Delfim and Pedro for the great photos. See you soon.