The Beginning!

Hello World! This is a blog that will document my adventure into the Raspberry Pi world. With the help of Dr. Hupy from the University of Wisconsin: Eau Claire's geography department, we will be sending a Raspberry Pi armed weather balloon up into the stratosphere to take some data and bring back some killer pictures from over 110,000 feet in the sky.

To put into perspective how high 110,000ft really is, an average pressurized cabin commercial airline flight is at 30-40,000 ft. The pressure at this height is .162psi (compared to about 14psi at ground level). At this pressure, human blood will literally boil at our body temperature. The temperature is about -51 degrees Fahrenheit... not a great place for people. But it is a great place for electronics!

Starting this project, I have absolutely no experience with the Raspberry Pi. In fact I have very little experience with electronics all together. I haven't done research before, nor have I done any serious computer programming outside of a class. I've never built circuits outside of a breadboard that have been used for any practical purpose. I expect to learn a lot from this project about electronics, computing, and research in general! I do however have some experience from a couple of Physics classes in circuits and electronics.

So here is what we have to start. A lot of stuff!!

Raspberry Pi Board
Raspberry Pi Camera Board
Pi NoIR Camera Board
Small Breadboard
perma proto board
Pi Cobbler
LSM303 Compass/Accelerometer
BMP 180 Pressure Sensor
Adafruit Ultimate GPS v3.1
GPS antenna
SMA to uFL #851 (not sure what this does yet)

I am noticing that I don't have any sort of I2C temperature sensor. It might be fun to build my own...