If you’re lofting a digital camera high into the stratosphere with a helium balloon, you really can’t do better than one of those key fob spy cameras. Being extremely lightweight with decent resolution, they’re the perfect camera to take to near space. If you’re bringing someone along to snap the pictures, that is.

[Román] wanted to take his 808 spy camera to new heights, but not wanting to manually reset the thing when it’s 100,000 feet in the air decided to use a microcontroller instead. An 8-pin PIC12F675 takes care of taking 60 pictures with a 4-second interval, then switching to movie mode and recording a 20-second video.

The entire device can be powered by 6 to 9 volts with the help of a voltage regulator. [Román] found the camera hangs after taking about 1600 photos, so a connection from the microcontroller to the reset switch was added. Everything works on the ground, so we can’t wait to see what happens miles above the Earth’s surface.