Lessons Learned - Defective Balloon

[bachri]

Folks;

I want to share with you our experience and lessons learned. April 28, 2017 was the date we chose to launch one of the 2000 g balloon with Payload 1: Eclipse video payload, Payload 2: Irridium, Payload 3: Gopro + SpotTrace, Payload 4: Radiation Monitors, and finally Cutdown mechanism  = 11.6 Lbs total (No Still Image payload). We had wheeled 2 x 200 CuFt Helium tanks to the desired location and started filling the balloon when it suddenly popped about half way. I have included some pictures and a video of the moment in the link below. Picture 1 clearly shows where the balloon started to tear, leading to complete rapture. Luckily we had the spare balloon handy and Chemistry Dept loaned us some Helium, which saved the day. About an hour later we were able to launch but because Helium we received was not enough we had to lighten the load for balloon to be able to lift off. Launched well and recovery went well. This is summary of what went on and what we learned:

See video here:   www.dropbox.com/sh/peffqwa3twif8ak/AAC-cjsn8AWE3qEf7eu8XZ11a?dl=0

(Copy/paste the link, no account necessary, close pop up if any.)


1. Take Additional Helium with you + Spare Balloon in case one balloon is defective! It was not the one marked with an X.
2. We streamed to youtube but lost video minutes after lift off. Reason: Arduino USB wire got caught under 80/20 arm support of dish, dish couldn't swivel down further and was blocked in a fixed position which I guess contributed to losing signal. 
3. Video was not recorded in MicroSD card of the video payload, I thought the video would stream + be recorded! I wish I had looked into this before actual flight! Someone let me know if there's something to be done to ensure Pi-video is recorded as well.
4. Landed on top of a 40 feet skinny tree. Next time we'll have an axe on us, but we had to buy one and ax the tree down
5. Recommend you place air poaches or Styrofoam to fix video payload within the box so it does shake. 
6. Recovery was a success and we learned a lot from this dry run.

Mind the cables! 
Hope this Helps
Bachri
 

 

[leviw]

Thanks for posting about this. It's really neat and interesting that you were recording the fill as the balloon popped.  We haven't had one pop on us yet but we've thought about the possibility.

Re: point 3. When you log into the pi via ssh and run a program, it only runs while you remain logged in. That means if you disconnect for very long, the video program stops and the stored video ends too early. The same thing happens on your desktop/laptop.  When you log off, the programs you were using aren't needed anymore, so they stop running.  The solution is to start the video recording/streaming program in the background. The pi runs linux so there are about 99 ways to do this.

The new MSU streaming code does it by starting the program as a daemon, which have nice tools to start/stop the program if, for instance, you're messing around with it and want to change the camera settings. However, I've only heard them talk about it on the teleconferences, I haven't seen code posted anywhere yet, so they are probably still testing/troubleshooting it.

In the meantime, I solved the problem for our team by adding the streaming program to a special system file that runs when the pi initially starts up. It's really easy to do (literally edit one file) and you can find my instructions here.  (Edit the resolution and fps as you like.)

By the way, even using the original streaming code and disconnecting mid flight, you should still have a partial video of the flight.  You can log into the pi and use something like this to search for video files in case it was saved somewhere unexpected:

find ~ -name "*.h264"