This project started life as a fun way to kill time for me and some of my buddies from my research lab. However it turned into a project for my prequel to Senior Design class.
The goal of the project was to send some cameras up as far as possible using a weather balloon and recover them to record the pictures.
Our vehicle achieved a height of over 100,000 feet over the course of 3 hours and then descended significantly faster due to the balloon not completely shredding correctly and shards getting tangled in our parachute.
The cameras was programmed to take pictures using CHDK. The two side facing cameras took pictures while the down facing camera took intermittent picture and video.
The capsule was retrieved using data provided by a GPS unit mounted to the arduino which was transmitted via text to a dedicated number as well as uploaded directly to a database using 3G data.