gps hacks

208 Articles

High Altitude Linux Weather Balloon

February 9, 2005 by 15 Comments

weather balloon

“i found it in my cow pasture, buried in the snow. i was riding my 4 wheeler.”  that’s what the postcard said when it returned to me after i sent it up with a helium balloon a couple weeks ago.  it traveled roughly 100 miles.

but i digress.

james meehan’s story began quite similarly, but he decided to take his balloon fascination to a much more fascinating and hackerly level.  follow the link to read about how he designed and constructed his linux powered weather balloon, complete with gps, packet radio uplink, and video camera.  he says it’s the coolest thing he’s ever done.  i can’t really vouch for what else he’s done, but this project is pretty darn cool.

when you’ve finished marvelling at this hack, make sure to also check out the home brew, high altitude glider we wrote about a while back.  i love this high altitude mischief.  if you know of similar projects, send ’em in!

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Homebrew, Autonomous, High Altitude Glider

January 12, 2005 by 9 Comments

high altitude glider

there are incredible hacks and then there are projects so unreal that the term hack just doesn’t seem appropriate.

this one fits squarely into the latter category and i’m posting it anyway.

art vanden berg details 4 years of designing a balloon launched glider that flies itself to a safe landing point using custom software running on a pc104 setup with a gps receiver, quickcam, 35mm camera, and packet radio. mission control is equally impressive with more custom software that tracks telemetry data, downloads real-time quickcam stills, and provides manual override of normal flight operation if necessary.

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Gps And Director Mx

November 11, 2004 by 4 Comments

gps and macs

here’s one for the mac peeps. i’ve received a few emails asking about how to get a gps to work on a mac and then writing a custom interface to display the data. macromedia flash “could” work but director is better at handling and manipulating bitmaps, so that being said–i dug up this example using a garmin eTrex vista and keyspan serial to usb adaptor.

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Add Location Data To Photos (latitude And Longitude)

October 20, 2004 by 13 Comments

sat

awhile back i wrote how to take gps data and use that to make satellite maps. well, at least once a week i get an email or instant message asking if there is a way to get gps data in to photos, or out. it seems a lot of people are really interested in this. which is great, imagine being able to search the web for locations and seeing the photos or sorting your photos by where they were taken automatically. here’s an app that helps that along–gpsphotolinker can be used to save gps position data to a photo. the latitude and longitude recorded by your gps unit while you were taking photos can be linked, and saved, to the photos.

it’s for mac only for now, if there’s a pc version that does the same thing i’ll post it up. this is a great tool for all sorts of camera / gps hack projects, we’ll have some of those up soon here too.

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