Image of the Day: This Raspberry Pi captured images of Earth from a weather balloon

I bet you want to know what cool things you can do with a tiny and inexpensive Raspberry Pi. For starters, you can send your Pi into the sky to capture images of earth from above.

Last week, Dave Ackerman, a British man with an interest in high-altitude ballooning, used the new $25 Raspberry Pi, 5-megapixel camera module to capture pictures of earth from almost 25 miles high. Ackerman has been toying around with this idea since he received his first Raspberry Pi computer last year.

Ackerman's Raspberry Pi tracker comprised a model A Pi and a pre-production Pi camera built into a foam
replica of the Raspberry Pi logo. (Image via Dave Ackerman)

His goal

Ackerman hoped to take pictures of earth from space and transmit them to ground-based computers. He was also looking to break his record from a previous attempt that sent images back from 25 miles up in the sky (his Raspberry Pi never returned from that mission). Although he didn’t succeed in exceeding his previous record, he did get some pretty good low-, medium-, and high resolution photos.

The launch

Las Sunday, Ackerman brought his Raspberry Pi (enclosed in a foam replica of the Raspberry Pi logo — a raspberry) to Berkshire, England, attached it to a balloon and let it loose. Once the balloon reached an altitude of 39,441 m, it popped and landed near Swindon, England, about 25 miles from its initial launch site.

Luckily, a bystander picked it up and notified Ackerman (who thought he had lost another one). Once he got it home, he copied the images from the SD card and put them up for us enthusiasts to enjoy.

Take a look at these images captured by his Raspberry Pi:

In order to set up his Raspberry Pi before its launch, Ackerman used the Pi’s camera software and changed its coding to allow the camera to snap different size images for the different radio channels and SD card being used. He also altered the Pi’s voltage regulator so that its tracker could run off of a lower voltage and therefore run longer on the AA batteries being used.

Learn more about how Dave Ackerman did it and follow his upcoming projects on his website.