Adafruit Tech Used to Capture Moon’s #SolarEclipse Shadow from 97,000 Feet! | @adafruit #citizenscience
#SolarEclipse – the moon’s shadow! – which passed near his home in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He built a custom trackuino shield for Arduino Uno, in combination with an Adafruit PowerBoost 500 Shield – check out the build below, and first up here’s some more details on the project:
-The balloon was a Totex 1000g filled with helium. And the recovery parachute was 48″ in diameter.
-A Canon AS1100 (eBay) hacked with CHDK and running a lua intervalometer script (focus locked to infinity, zoom locked to WA, and exposures at 5 second intervals.
-The homebuilt trackuino shield was jacked in on top of an Arduino Uno and broadcasting APRS packets at 9600 baud at 144.390 MHz every 30 sec. with GPS and sensor data via a homemade 1/4 wave 2m antenna at 300mW. Thanks to Hank Cantrell (W4HTB) for the help tuning SWR.
The rest, like the buzzer and LEDs, were scrounged from older, unrelated projects and cobbled together into a payload (medical styrofoam shipping cooler) that was small enough to retain heat and keep the batteries warm (lithium not alkaline).
The pictures (32GB card full) are good, but the learning was great.
High altitude balloon launch and recovery on eclipse day!
Thanks Tracy for the very wide-open launch site and Kevin for the all-day assist. You can see the moon’s shadow in a few of the pictures (mid-flight). We had a really good day today.
Launch: 11:20
98,000 feet to burst altitude
Touchdown at 3:45
Here’s a picture taken shortly after launch:
Heading up still:
Looking back down on earth, covered in the moon’s shadow:
Amazing:
Here’s the route the balloon took from launch to crash-and-recovery:
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Open Hardware is In, New CircuitPython and Pi 5 16GB, and much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
