Picoballoon - DEVLOG #1 🎈

Hello!

This month i have been obsessed with picoballoons.

What is a picoballoon? ⬇️

Picoballoon is a helium/hydrogen balloon carrying light tracker beneath it. If you are lucky/build them correctly, they are capable of flying for couple of days/weeks in stratosphere.

They are equipped with long range radio transmitter 📻

I will be using LoRaWAN radio protocol (because I don’t have HAM radio license:D) It can send data packets on ISM band to a ground radio station.
(TTN gateway in my case)

I will further explain how it should work in further devlogs/README. 📎

Back to my logged hours.

First hour

CAD design of tracker case in FUSION 360 (I will maybe not use it, because it is too heavy) I also printed it.

Rest of the time

Soldering hell :D
Accidentally broke 2 pads off on the RF module. (most important 2 ) I had to desolder it and i need to replace it.
I didn’t test the solar power system yet. Hope it will work.

I didn’t record drawing the wiring, because I forgot to.

AI helped me by correcting my wiring scheme (I forgot some things while making it)

I hope my english is readable, thanks for reading!