[HN Gopher] High-Altitude Adventure with a DIY Pico Balloon
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High-Altitude Adventure with a DIY Pico Balloon
Author : jnord
Score : 104 points
Date : 2026-02-01 00:14 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| pingou wrote:
| Pretty cool, although it's polluting so hopefully it wouldn't
| become too popular (probably not).
|
| "And because such diminutive payloads don't pose a danger to
| aircraft" even though they are small and wouldn't make a plane
| crash, I can imagine they would cause some damage if they ever
| enter a jet engine, although that would be unlucky as they would
| mostly fly higher than aircraft. I also wouldn't like it to fall
| on my head, but with the solar panels as depicted and the small
| weight I suppose it could somewhat glide.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| It also reminds me of the recent incident where an object
| (potentially a weather balloon) struck a plane windscreen and
| caused significant damage to it, as well as injuring one of the
| flight crew. I don't know if it would cause the same amount of
| damage given it's size, but hitting any solid object at
| cruising speed is sure to leave a mark
| squeefers wrote:
| shouldnt be cruising in the balloon lane then
| ankit_mishra wrote:
| Balloon doesn't teleport to the balloon lane though
| HNisCIS wrote:
| That was a much larger balloon that had sand ballast. The
| sand was what did the damage
| NoiseBert69 wrote:
| There are thousands of weather balloon starts every day without
| any damages to airplanes.
|
| It's not factor as long they are not crossing a specific
| size/weight - jet engines and windows from airplanes are tested
| to withstand a direct impact.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yeah, and pico baloons are extremely tiny, often at 10 grams
| or less, comprising some very thin plastic, some thin wire
| and tiny PCBs - this is also how they can fly so high for so
| long.
|
| Lost of types of hail will be much heavier and harder on
| impact for example.
| mkarliner wrote:
| QRPLabs sell even lighter trackers https://www.qrp-
| labs.com/u4b.html
|
| and AFAIK are the goto supplier for HAB (High Altitude
| Ballooning) enthusiasts.
| ajxs wrote:
| Very cool! Brings this to mind: https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2023/feb/17/object-us-mi...
| bambax wrote:
| This sounds so cool!
|
| > _I'm a little puzzled about the balloons' telemetry messages
| received on the WSPR network, as they have been few and far
| between._
|
| But wouldn't there be a way to send messages to Starlink
| satellites instead of WSPR? Is it a problem of power consumption?
| (It would be great to be able to transmit images, not just GPS
| pings).
| radeeyate wrote:
| If you are wanting to send images, there are already some cool
| ways to do that: either SSTV
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television) or Wenet,
| which sends them at a much higher speed:
| https://github.com/projecthorus/wenet.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| I wrote some code to send SSTV because everything was either
| proprietary and didn't work, shareware and didn't work (and
| often with the original author gone Silent Key so no way to
| get the real version), or under some vaguely-specified
| licence and written with Tk widgets in Fortran or some damn
| thing.
|
| I wrote it about 25 years ago and can't currently find it but
| it's one one of these hard disks in these here blue moving
| crates somewhere. It'd take less time to recreate than find,
| I suspect, especially if I also wanted to make it build
| nicely in gcc from this decade.
|
| It just grabbed from a V4L2 source, and emitted a burst of
| Robot36 over the soundcard. In conjunction with a heavy-duty
| Tait T2000-family transceiver I used it to livestream a drive
| across Glasgow, slowly and noisily, sending one picture per
| minute which gave the poor PA transistor time to cool a bit
| ;-)
| m4rtink wrote:
| Starlink is totally oit of picobaloon range by orders of
| magnitude - we are talking hundreds of mW at most.
|
| At the same time it is true the board (rpi pico usually) could
| totally support a camera or other high bandwidth instruments -
| it just does not have the bandwidth to send the data over wspr,
| possibly with the exception of some flags based on local
| processing.
|
| AFAIK some poeple have built dual APRS & WSPR pico baloons, but
| you will still get pictures back only over populated areas due
| to APRS having in general much shorter range than WSPR.
| SuperMouse wrote:
| I'm currently thinkering of building a balloon with a 2.4GHz LoRa
| transmitter (SX128x) and a low-power STM32U microcontroller.
|
| Why?
|
| - You can repurpose 2.4GHz Wifi gear opening many doors
|
| - You can easily include volunteers dumping data from HF into a
| IP sink for telemetry. TTGO offers boards with 2.4GHz LoRa.
|
| - Theoretically you still can add a "low rate" 868MHz/433MHz and
| a "high rate" 2.4GHz for transmitting pictures and other stuff
| more quickly.
|
| - BOM friendly. As the balloon might get lost you have to plan a
| bit for costs.
| iberator wrote:
| lol. WPRS works like 10.000km per WATT on HF. You can't do it
| with 2.4ghz.
|
| Ham radio basics
| SuperMouse wrote:
| lol. 10.000km with a few bits of fixed-structure payload you
| mean.
|
| Encoding basics
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Why do they do WSPR on HF and not 2.4GHz?
|
| What's the important part that defines what kind of range you
| can get?
| maccam912 wrote:
| WSPR on HF makes sense down here on the surface of the
| planet because certain ranges of frequencies (not the same
| range always, but generally always within HF) can bounce
| off of upper atmosphere layers and pinball back and forth
| to get signals to someone or from someone who couldn't be
| seen line-of-sight because of the curvature of the Earth.
| For line of sight work, the 2.4GHz in theory would work as
| well as anything, but another trick WSPR has is that it
| doesn't allow for arbitrary data to be sent. Sender and
| receiver encode the limited information in an agreed-upon
| way and then it takes a long time, like minutes, to send
| that little bit of data. Very high redundancy.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| You know that and I know that, it was a Socratic question
| aimed at OP ;-)
|
| In the olden days we did QRSS, FSK Morse with a dot rate
| in the order of minutes.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yeah, our baloon was recorded by WSPR eeceivers thousands
| of kilometers away when it crossed the arctic circle for
| a day - we wpuld have no data if it were dependent on
| line of sight or even just flying over inhabited
| territory.
|
| And indeed, the relions take minures to send a couple
| dozen bits of data. But the modulation is done in such a
| clever way, that it does not really matter - you know
| ehere the probe with your callsign was, how high, ground
| speed, temperature and panel volatage. There is quite
| agressive heuristics applied (eg. different precision for
| different altitudes as you don't really expect it to stay
| low for any ammount of time and survive, position via
| grid squares with course position still available even if
| you have incomplete data from a relation) so the few
| dozen bits are enough. :)
|
| It is all super clever and hats off for those who
| developed this system. :)
| Neywiny wrote:
| Why not use the STMs that have the LoRa built in?
| sciurus wrote:
| If you're interested in high altitude ballooning, there's an
| active community around it.
|
| https://arhab.org/
|
| https://www.superlaunch.org/
| AtlasGains wrote:
| This is way cooler than I expected. I had no idea you could do
| near-space stuff for the price of a dinner, or that ham radio
| networks like WSPR could track something globally without
| satellites. Feels like one of those "old tech + clever hacks"
| projects that shouldn't work but somehow does. Also kind of wild
| that a party balloon can end up halfway around the world.
| hasbot wrote:
| Tracking site: https://amateur.sondehub.org
| superkuh wrote:
| I wish the regulations around HAB were not so lighter-than-air
| gas centric. Hot air balloons are much more accessible,
| especially solar heated hot air balllons. But they have much less
| lift per volume and so the FAA FAR 101 rules basically say they
| all have to be treated as the type where you inform the FAA
| beforehand and then every hour about their position among other
| things.
|
| https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
|
| >any balloon that is moored to the surface of the earth or an
| object thereon and that has a diameter of more than 6 feet or a
| gas capacity of more than 115 cubic feet.
|
| And the regulations on tethered balloons end up being even
| stricter than letting them go.
| daemonologist wrote:
| FAA wants you to use hydrogen. >roll safe<
| maples37 wrote:
| Okay, though, for very small hobbyist payloads, though,
| wouldn't hydrogen balloons be feasible?
|
| Some quick math tells me that you can lift approximately a
| kilogram of mass per cubic meter (at sea level, anyway). If
| your balloon's full weight is a half of a kilogram, you'd
| only need about a large beach ball filled with hydrogen to
| lift it. That seems like something that would be attainable
| for an outdoor DIY electrolysis setup.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| As well they should be. The tether represents far more of a
| risk to aviation than the actual baloon. Not only it is much
| larger a collision risk, it cuts through GA airspace where all
| the delicate stuff flies.
| m4rtink wrote:
| It is super cool - we managed to launch one on a pair of
| Aliexpress wedding baloons filled with helium and it tracked all
| the way from Europe to South Korea, for about a week.
|
| It even breached the arctic circle and entered the jet stream for
| a bit (140+ km/h ground speed) :-)
| buildsjets wrote:
| I wonder what your liability would be in the event your balloon
| were to be struck by a commercial aircraft and cause injury to
| the flight crew or passengers?
|
| https://komonews.com/news/local/weather-balloon-launched-in-...
| HNisCIS wrote:
| That balloon was several orders is magnitude heavier, pico
| balloons pose no risk.
|
| Note that there are operators running balloons several orders
| bigger still, like Aerostar. They're essentially flying mid
| size satellites
| NoiseBert69 wrote:
| Jet engines are tested for this.
|
| They basically can shoot (not only throwing!) entire frozen
| chicken cadavers into engines with zero damage.
|
| The only way they managed break the entire engine was to place
| little explosives on the turbine wings. Even that didn't cause
| a fatal disintegration of the jet engine.
|
| Somewhere on YT there's a super entertaining video from a test
| facility.
| ankit_mishra wrote:
| FAA explicitly requires birds used in strike tests NOT be
| frozen, because frozen birds do not realistically simulate
| real bird strikes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_gun
| buildsjets wrote:
| Well first, the linked article was regarding a weather
| balloon that impacted the windscreen, not the engine, and it
| did cause an injury to the flight crew. Here are pictures of
| the bloody, glass-shard filled flight deck.
| https://www.facebook.com/aviation247/posts/n17327-united-
| air... So the hazard is real.
|
| Now back to your uninformed comment. I do certification
| testing of jet engines, and we most certainly DO NOT test jet
| engines against the ingestion of airborne electronics.
|
| I have personally loaded and fired the five barrel bird gun
| at General Electric's Peebles Test operation many times over
| the years. We use a range of birds and bird simulators, but
| none of them are ever chickens, and none of them are frozen.
|
| There is not any requirement for zero engine damage. Little
| sparrows will do no damage. Ducks and geese cause extensive
| damage every single time. Extensive engine damage is
| permitted so long that the engine shuts down without causing
| catastrophic damage to the airframe. The specific damage that
| must be prevented, per 14 cfr 33.75, is below. Any other
| damage is acceptable.
|
| (i) Non-containment of high-energy debris;
|
| (ii) Concentration of toxic products in the engine bleed air
| intended for the cabin sufficient to incapacitate crew or
| passengers;
|
| (iii) Significant thrust in the opposite direction to that
| commanded by the pilot;
|
| (iv) Uncontrolled fire;
|
| (v) Failure of the engine mount system leading to inadvertent
| engine separation;
|
| (vi) Release of the propeller by the engine, if applicable;
| and
|
| (vii) Complete inability to shut the engine down.
|
| https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-C.
| ..
| HNisCIS wrote:
| In the summer you could theoretically station-keep a few of these
| over a city for a few hours at least with proper wind and lift
| gas planning. Could be enough to fly a stripped town T1000e or
| similar meshtastic relay during a natural disaster
| NoSalt wrote:
| > _" My first pico balloon made it only halfway across the
| Atlantic before going silent."_
|
| As if we needed more junk in the ocean.
| nodesocket wrote:
| I've been working on a hobby project to send a Raspberry Pi into
| the stratosphere (nothing really novel) but with all custom
| software. The entire process, hardware, and stack is documented
| on the GitHub [1]. Essentially all the software and major
| components are purchased. I'm just waiting for the spring and
| then start some tests with balloons, helium mixtures, and iron
| out any regulatory issues. If this interest you or you have any
| experience would love help or contributions. The launch will
| happen in Tennessee.
|
| [1] https://github.com/stratopi-org/stratopi
| ge96 wrote:
| I always like their illustrations that "minimalist?" two-three
| color orange
| IrishJourno wrote:
| Thank you, I'm glad you agree they are nice! The artist is
| James Provost, he's done most of the illustrations for Hands On
| since we switched over from photography a few years ago (I'm
| the IEEE Spectrum editor responsible for the column).
| ge96 wrote:
| I like your Video Fridays, good to see latest in robotics
| airbreather wrote:
| Isn't H2 better because better lift and being a molecule of two
| hydrogen atoms it is not quite as slippery as helium and quite
| easy to make?
|
| From wikipedia "lifting gas"
|
| "Helium is the second lightest gas (0.1786 g/L, 14% the density
| of air, at STP). For that reason, it is an attractive gas for
| lifting as well.
|
| A major advantage is that this gas is noncombustible. But the use
| of helium has some disadvantages, too: The
| diffusion issue shared with hydrogen (though, as helium's
| molecular radius, 138 pm, is smaller, it diffuses through more
| materials than hydrogen[4])."
| mlsu wrote:
| and at this scale it seems like the hazards of h2 would be
| pretty minor. You're not exactly going to have a Hindenburg
| situation with only a couple dozen liters of H2.
| snitch182 wrote:
| No but you might get serverely hearing impaired..
| andrewla wrote:
| It really seems like there is no downside to this, other than
| the minuscule risk of a low-altitude puncture + spark causing a
| fire, and even there the exposure is small because the amount
| of hydrogen gas is so much small.
|
| Not to mention that hydrogen is free for anyone who has water
| and a power source.
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