Overlook Horizon five is launching today so let’s talk about what’s new for 2017.
Hey guys, Tory here from Overlook Horizon.
Our return to flight for 2017 is finally here,
Overlook Horizon five, nicknamed
Continuity, is launching today.
The name Continuity for this flight represents today’s primary objective which is the successful
and continuous reception of radio positioning transmissions throughout the entire flight.
If you followed along with our flights from last year, you’ll remember that on flights
3 and 4 we experienced some strange and frustrating loss of signal which led
to a tense recovery period while we awaited the fate of the flights.
During some painstaking troubleshooting we tested everything from wiring to software,
but finally discovered that it was our cameras that were the source of some electromagnetic interference
that was disrupting our boards and our GPS systems.
Just check out this video.
You’ll see on the phone, which is running a GPS analytics app, that it has a strong
GPS signal with numerous satellites that it is locked on to.
Once we power on the cameras, notice how the number of satellites drops until the phone
completely loses all GPS signal.
Power off the cameras, and the phone’s GPS returns to normal operation with numerous
locked satellites appearing again.
It took us a while to find this, but hopefully we’ve got this nailed down for this flight.
Today, each camera will be wrapped in copper tape which creates a faraday cage around the cameras
that should contain the electromagnetic interference from the camera and reduce the interference
impact it has on our onboard GPS systems.
In addition to this, we’re also using a larger payload box to create some more space
between the cameras and the tracking system and we’ve also switch from a passive GPS
antenna to an active GPS antenna.
This active GPS antenna contains a filter and an amplifier to weed out interference
on the GPS signals.
Now, let’s talk about what else is new for this year’s flights.
One of the big issues we had while trying to troubleshoot that GPS interference issue
was the number of things that could have gone wrong electronically with our boards.
We had numerous wires and crossovers which made it difficult to try to locate a possible
short, a broken wire or a failed component.
To eliminate this, we’ve designed and built our own custom circuit boards this year which means
that the tracking system is cleaner. There are far fewer wires which means there’s
less of a chance of a short or a broken or incorrectly wired connection.
Our tracking system also uses a number of external components that need to connect
to the board.
These are things like the batteries that power the board & the cameras, temperature sensors and
a few audible alarms that we place on the outside of the payload.
These all used to be directly soldered to our boards for their connections, which again,
added to the difficulty with troubleshooting issues.
The system is now designed to be operated with or without these external components
and each component can now be easily connected or disconnect from the board to make it easy
to isolate an issue or remove a component completely, if it's necessary.
Another change for this year is our new lithium ion rechargeable batteries which was also
a pain point for troubleshooting and testing last year.
Battery voltages typically drop over time as the batteries drain, but we need to make sure that we’re testing
with peak voltages so we know we’re testing the system using the exact setup that will
be used on flight day.
Last year, testing with the exact setup meant we had to buy a fresh pack of batteries each
time we wanted to test, which got expensive fast.
Our new batteries take up a little less space, but more importantly, they’re rechargeable
which means we can easily test and retest with the exact power setup that we expect to have
at launch time.
Along with the new batteries, we’re also using something called a power booster for
our cameras which means we can use fewer batteries to make the payload a little lighter.
The power boosters, which are known as a step-up DC-to-DC power converters, are designed to
take a lower voltage battery and output a higher voltage.
In our case, for each camera we’re taking one 3.7 volt battery and converting it to
a 5 volt output which is what the cameras need to run.
The step up converter does this by drawing extra current from the batteries to boost that voltage.
The tradeoff here is that the batteries will have a shorter lifespan.
We expect this to be fine, but it’s a bit of an experiment.
Our calculations indicate that the batteries will power the cameras for about 3 hours and this
flight should last 2 hours and 45 minutes so
we’re riding the edge here, but we’re expecting an acceptable outcome even if that
means we don’t capture the final moments of the flight on camera.
Lastly, this flight will be using an 800 gram balloon which is a little larger than our
previous 600 gram balloons.
This will lead to a flight that’s about 20 minutes longer in duration and it should
also travel a little higher.
Our prediction put this flight close to 100,000 feet in altitude so we’re hoping
to break that barrier for the first time on this flight.
Those are the major changes for today and for this year’s flights.
We’ve got at least five flights planned for the spring and summer of 2017 so make
sure you’re following us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to stay up to date on the flights.
Also, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss any of our live
broadcasts, our in-flight videos or the educational series videos that we’ll have in between flights.
What do you guys think about today’s flight?
Do you have any ideas for future flight changes?
What else do you want to know?
Let us know in the comments section down below.
If you like this flight and you like what we do, hit that thumbs up button.
If you want to learn more about today’s flight, check out the links in the description, below.
Thanks again for watching and we’ll see you in the next video!