I launched a payload as a teen to the stratosphere to measure algae fluorescence

Hi HN!

I'm Andrew, and I'm a high school student who participated in Hack Club's Apex program, which funded 30 students to built high altitude balloon (HAB) payloads.

My project, StratoSpore, was an attempt to use algae fluorescence as a biological sensor for detecting changes in altitude and stratospheric conditions.

This challenge involved a full electronics and software design cycle: - I designed PCBs based on Raspberry Pi Picos for sensor logging (AS7264 spectral sensor, temps, etc) and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for data processing - Implementing a highly lossy, custom compression algorith to compress 1080p images down to 18x10 pixels for sending of LoRA (915 Mhz) along with shoving a bunch of telemetry into 45 bytes. - Unfortunately, the payload couldn't be recovered as it is stuck in a dense forest. I also had some GPS problems and had to splice some data.

This was a huge step outside my comfort zone and taught me about hardware design, logistics, and compression.

I'd love to hear and thoughts or technical critiques on the design of software. If you have any questions, I'd love to answer them. Code/hardware is on GitHub (https://github.com/radeeyate/stratospore), and I hope you enjoy the blog post!