[High Altitude Photo Project – yay!]
Picked up an Alix.6e2 board to control the balloon systems! The Alix 6e2 is an all in one computer about the size of a CD jewel case that has very low power requirements so you can (hopefully) run it with a battery.
We successfully got Debian based Voyage Linux installed on the headless system and using a 2GB compact flash card 🙂
Using the excellent tools provided by GPS Visualizer and UWYO’s engineering department, I confirmed that it would be a bad idea to launch the balloon from my house 🙂
The projected trajectory ends up with the balloon landing in the Pacific Ocean several miles north of Santa Barbara…
I successfully sent some text messages from Ubuntu via a Motorola RAZR V3 cell phone connected via USB!
Here is the the gnokiirc config file:
.gnokiirc
[global]
# This is default phone config section
model = AT
connection = serial
port = /dev/ttyACM0
gnokii identifies the phone as follows:
greg@ubuntu:~$ gnokii –identify
GNOKII Version 0.6.26
IMEIÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â : IMEI358349012072938
Manufacturer : Motorola CE, Copyright 2004
Model       : GSM900″,”GSM1800″,”GSM1900″,”GS
Product name : GSM900″,”GSM1800″,”GSM1900″,”GS
Revision    : R3442A_G_0E.43.08R
And to send an SMS message to my cell:
greg@ubuntu:~$ gnokii –sendsms +18056162002
This is what we’ll use to locate the payload once it lands. The computer will send periodic GPS location info via SMS to the recovery crew 🙂