Our First Test Flight

After nearly a year in development we finally managed our first Tracksoar test flight. It has been a long process to get to this point but we finally have a version worthy of proper flight testing. We put the Tracksoar through it’s paces in a number of ground tests, including cold soaks in dry ice, battery test after battery test, letting it report for days on end, driving tests, etc. but now its time for the real deal.

We secured an 80ft^3 helium tank, a 300 gram balloon, some string and lots of zipties and we were ready. Saturday we packed up the cars and headed out for Maricopa CA to our launch site just outside of town. The predictions we ran had it bursting at 101,000 feet and traveling 32 miles North East to land just outside Shafter CA. We had a light breeze and not too warm a day so we setup camp after an hour and a half drive up the 33 and 166. We arrived around 2pm, much later than we had hoped but there were some delays as one of the components on the board was not behaving and needed to be resoldered. With our tarp setup and pinned down we began double checking the Tracksoar, making sure it was reporting reliably. We had more than double the required helium in our tank and using our homebrew filling pipe we started the filling process. Due to an incorrectly threaded fitting on the regulator we had to fill very slowly, the whole process taking a half hour to complete. With the balloon filled and the Tracksoar attached we were ready for lift off. We ended up using less than half of our helium so we have enough for our next flight.

After letting go it only took a minute or two for the Tracksoar to begin hitting igates and reporting its location once a minute like clockwork. We got valid sensor data from the pressure sensor and temperature sensor, but the humidity sensor was giving us some issues. Still the reports rolled in and we tracked it across the valley for about a half hour before disaster struck. We stopped receiving reports around 47,000 feet and just over weedpatch. Unfortunately that was the last report we heard and with no back up tracker the payload was lost.

Not to be defeated we started reviewing what could have failed on the board. Batteries was the first thought, succumbing to the -37f temperatures but with our cold soak test data that was quickly ruled out. The other possibility battery related is that in the 90+ mph winds a battery could have popped out of the holder, further testing will need to be performed to see if we can reproduce this. The current best guess is that the humidity sensor stopped reporting, and caused the frimware to enter a loop waiting for valid data and not transmitting until it was received. We have since updated the firmware to prevent this issue in further launches. With the partial success under our belt we have laid out a timeline for further testing and will continue testing until we have a complete and successful flight. Then we move on to the next big test, putting together a successful kickstarter campaign.