High-Altitude Balloon

Our capstone team built an instrument payload that rode a weather balloon to the edge of space, about 25 km up. It recorded temperature, humidity, motion, magnetic field, power use, and radiation levels throughout the flight.

I worked on the payload's sensing and data side, including logging from two Geiger-counter radiation sensors, a two-hour cold-soak test, and a side-by-side lab comparison of the two counters.

Hardware that flies can't be patched mid-flight. It has to be tested against cold, power limits, and failure before launch.

Collect reliable environmental, inertial, power, and radiation data through a flight with extreme cold, low pressure, and no chance of intervention.

An onboard flight computer initializes the sensor suite at power-up and writes one timestamped CSV row per sample to an SD card. Two independent Geiger counters log radiation counts.

1. 01SensorsBME, LSM IMU, LIS3MDL, INA
2. 02Flight computertimestamped sampling
3. 03SD-card CSV log20 channels
4. 04Radiation counters2 Geiger modules
5. 05Post-flight analysis

1. 01Redundant radiation sensingTwo different Geiger counter modules were logged side by side so readings could be cross-checked.
2. 02Environmental pre-testingPayload electronics went through a two-hour cold test, and both counters ran a 45-minute lab comparison before flight.

• -Logging 20 channels per sample (temperature, humidity, altitude, gas resistance, 3-axis magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope, bus voltage, current, internal/external temperature) without data loss.

Flight altitude

≈ 25 km

Embedded data logging · BME environmental sensor · LSM IMU · LIS3MDL magnetometer · INA power monitor · Geiger counters

• View in the terminal →