Makers Ethan, Satyam, and Rohan were able to go on a test flight with Bill Brown, and test out their payload for the HSIS Competition.
It turned out that the payloads had dropped into a woman’s backyard off of Donna Avenue right next to her cathouse. She has a large outbuilding and fence covering about a good portion of her yard as a cat sanctuary for two wild cats that she didn’t want roaming the neighborhood after she moved to the city from the country. Her cat “Tom” seemed particularly interested in the buzzing ozonesonde sitting right next to his fenced in sanctuary…..photo of the landing site (myself and the Makers 256 team holding the payloads). The Makers 256 club is participating in a competition called Hacker Spaces in Space to take photos in Near Space as economically as possible.

You meet some interesting people when you drop things on them from 20 miles up.
~Bill Brown

Left to Right:  Bill Brown, Ethan Chew, Rohan Rana, Satyam Nayak

Yesterday Ratmandu and Myself headed out on a journey to find the last remaining Parallax RFID Readers from Radio Shack.  We headed to Decatur first, where we found 5 in stock.  From there we went to Florence and picked up another 4.  According to Radio Shack’s database, north Alabama and south Tennessee no long have them in stock.

Also while looking around the Florence Radio Shack we found the Palm Pre Touchstone charger on sale for $16.  We tested the output and its 5v.  So basically for $16 I now have a wireless charging setup.  I would like to put it in my phone, but it looks to be a pretty big challenge.

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The HSIS group completed their first test flight this past Saturday, April 10th. We had a camera scripted to take pictures every few seconds and a cell phone setup to post it’s GPS coordinates to a website to track on the ground. We were invited to hitchhike on one of UAH’s balloons. At 9am Saturday we met, activated, and assembled our payload for a 10am launch time.

Satyam and Ethan with packaged payload
Satyam and Ethan with packaged payload

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