As with all of my projects, they typically start by finding a crucial piece of kit that then sparks a whole development. Back in late 2022 I was searching through my shed for something when I happened upon a box of Pine A64 single board computers, that I’d completely forgotten about.

These were purchased from a Kickstarter campaign when 64-bit ARM was in its infancy and 64-bit ARM Linux distributions were not common. These new machines were difficult to get going, which is likely why they ended up in the shed. Needless to say, that box was pulled from the shed and sat on a shelf in my office until inspiration struck… could I build them into a High Altitude Balloon (HAB) telemetry tracking system ?

I’ve been involved with the Project Horus High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) group since August of 2010, my first flight was Horus 7 where we watched it land at our feet just shy of Pinnaroo in the North Eastern region of South Australia. Fast forward some 15 or more years and I’m still out there tracking balloons, having retired from actively chasing after them a number of years ago.

Over time much of the software for tracking these balloons had been ported to various flavours of Python from the original implementations in Java. For better or worse it has meant that this custom tracking software has migrated towards running on small embedded ARM single board computers. In late 2022 I’d heard that some within the Project Horus community were tracking balloons with Raspberry Pi’s and SDR’s, so here was the catalyst for some inspiration and I started to wonder if my original Pine A64’s were up to the task ?

Over the Christmas break in 2023 I cobbled together my first ARM based system and I’ve been experimenting with my High Altitude Balloon Telemetry System ever since. This work has been done on and off, when ever I was able to catch a few hours or days. The main focus typically came a few weeks before an actual balloon launch. This series of blog posts will document what I’ve learnt and how I’ve gone about setting my system up to current time.

More to follow.