Payload consisting of a Nokia Lumia 800 and NTX2 10mW transmitter.
- Finish SkyDrive auto-upload.
- Add logging of errors and data.
A custom Windows Phone app, written in C#, gathers data from the various on-board sensors - the most important being the GPS. This is then constructed into a standard UKHAS-style sentence.
The sentence makes its way back to Earth in several ways. Firstly, when a data connection is available (typically below 8km), the phone will upload the sentences to Habitat's CouchDB itself. It will also tweet its location to an undecided twitter account.
However, a radio transmitter is also onboard and using the headphone socket we can output a tone with varying amplitude, resulting in a varying voltage, which can then be fed through a simple AM demodulator resulting in RTTY entering the NTX2. This means that the payload can be tracked as normal via radio by trackers across the country for the full duration of its flight.
And what is the point of a high altitude balloon launch without photos and video? The Lumia's camera will be running throughout, snapping pics and recording clips of video for people to gaze at when it returns to Earth.
- Daniel Saul