I'm teaching 15 Idaho teachers how to make and use BalloonSats. The class is called iSTEM and for the class, I am creating BalloonSat kits. These kits contain all the electronics and tools to make a BalloonSat from scratch. Each BalloonSat will have three sensors to choose from, a camera, two temperature sensor array, and a temperature and relative humidity sensor array. With a little more funding, I can also add a LED photometer array, and a temperature and pressure array.

It takes a lot of stuff to make a fleet of BalloonSats.

New Pressure Sensor Kit

NearSys has been developing (slowly) a new pressure sensor kit to replace the Weather Station kit that it sold back in 2009. The NearSys Pressure Sensor kit will become part of a new weather station kit and is available as a separate kit for BalloonSats that only need to measure air pressure. Therefore, look for more kit offerings in the very near future that incorporate the NearSys Pressure Sensor kit.

The sensor requires calibration with a 35 mL syringe. The syringe can also be used for further vacuum experiments, like making water boil at low air pressures, as shown below.

Experiments with a Quadcopter

One of the neatest toys on the market today is the quadcopter. These flying machines basically fly themselves - just point them and they go. If you get nervous or scared, then just take your hands off the controls and they hover. Get really confused and just press the Return to Home button. I'm experimenting with using quadcopters to test near space payloads. In other words, as an exciting way to test BalloonSat avionics. The first test involved sending my Blade Chroma to maximum altitude with a pressure and temperature sensor from a BalloonSat. That along with a camera. Here is a picture from around 100 meters.

A flight at night recorded the following data. The altitude is based on ascent time.

My latest tests seem to indicate that my pressure sensor can detect changes in pressure altitude as small as 7.5 feet.

NearSys Announces the Birth of a 8.5 oz Walking Robot

We don't need no stinking wheels. NearSys is expanding its robotic offerings with a walking robot kit. You can see a short video of the product at, https://youtu.be/kuXDXDx7FWk

Updated Website

There are new updates on the website. First, data from mission NearSys 04A was located and moved to the website. You can find this data at http://nearsys.com/arhab/flightdata/2004/a/index.htm.

Second, NearSys helped fly three BalloonSat missions for students of the Bellevue, WA school district. You'll find information from those missions at, http://nearsys.com/arhab/flightdata/2014/index.htm.

Ion Chamber

NearSys is experimenting with ion chambers as an affordable radiation detector for robots and near space. The designs under experiment can be found at Charles Wenzel's website, http://techlib.com/

The electronics are soldered to a perf board and shielded with a copper pipe cap. The electronics are bolted to the can of the chamber, making the ion chamber a very durable unit.

Currently, the ion chamber under study is being read by the READADC command. to my surprise, I have determined that 5.5 MeV alphas from Americiunm-241 can be detected by the chamber but not 4.5 MeV alphas from Uranium-238

LED-based Color Detector

NearSys is testing an application based on the work of Forest Mims. In thre early 1990's. Mr. Mims published on an interesting effect, LEDs produce current when exposed to light, mosrt especially when the light has the color that the LED produces. The reason this happens is because LEDs are like little solar cells.

So after experimenting with using LEDs as a near space photometer for several years, NearSys is now experimenting with using them in a robotics application. In this case, the unit contains two different color LEDs for detecting and two fo the same color LEDs for a light source.

A two LED color detector being tested on red-colored floor

A robot controller using this unit measures the voltage produced by both LEDs to determine the color being illiminated. The best comparison seems to be made by multiplying the two values. A red and green seems to be most effective at distinguishing between colors as the graph below illustrates.

It also appears that two infrared LEDs, one 870 nm and the other 940 nm are effective at distinguishing between gloss black and flat black surfaces.

Look for a short article about this new color detector and a YouTube video in the near future.

Here's a reference for Mr. Mims' original article

Mims III, Forrest M. "Sun Photometer with Light-emitting diodes as spectrally selective detectors" Applied Optics. Vol. 31, No. 33. November 20, 1992.