Category: Hacking

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Aurora-1 High Altitude Balloon Launch- Delayed

After much agonizing and running constant landing predictions for the last 6 weeks- I have decided to delay the launch of the High Altitude Balloon.  Currently the conditions in Goderich Ontario Canada are not suitable for a safe controlled launch, flight and recovery.

HAB Project

This, unfortunately, means we will not be able to partake in the Global Space Balloon Challenge hosted by M.I.T university.  Although this was never the primary focus for the mission, it would have been fun to participate.

Much of the recovery area here in Ontario is still covered in spring melt water (and today 2 inches of fresh snow).  This makes recovery difficult.  As well, the high altitude winds have allowed for only 4 suitable launch days in the last 6 weeks of simulations.

We will simply need to wait a bit longer so we can achieve our goal of a near-space mission with our balloon and payload module.  I will update everyone as soon as we have a projected launch window.

Thanks to everyone who has followed along with this project.  It has truly been a fun journey and we haven’t even launched yet 🙂

Follow all the build videos here:

High Altitude Balloon Forum can be found here:

http://mkme.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=24

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The history of “Hacking” for me

I look back at my life and some of the most fond learning experiences I can recollect are of exploring a new hardware or software that I did not yet understand.  To me, this is the foundation for knowledge building and “hacking” as I know it.

In Grade 9 as a high school student I was fortunate enough to have an electronics teacher with a very “loose” curriculum.  Very few “rules” were enforced and students were encouraged to explore, build and learn with any equipment we had available to us (most donated junk but we actually built some very capable PCs for the time (monochrome monitors and MS DOS haha)

I learned more from the after hours meetings and “borrowing” those PC parts than I could have ever imagined.  Skills we developed would be the foundation for our careers and mindsets for many years to come.

One caveat- unfortunately not all areas of the education system shared this open attitude and several of us found ourselves “banned” from the library and all other school owned PC’s, phones and equipment for simply attempting to discover how this “network” thingy worked 🙂

Long story short- The inquisitive nature we seemingly all share as makers, hobbyists, hackers and inventors drives us all to do amazing things.  Most of which- we won’t fully realize until many years later.

Here is a documentary which I always though summed up the “spirit” of true hacking and exploration.
Cheers

 

http://youtu.be/Y47m1cOyKjA