This article describes a project to design, build, launch, and recover a high-altitude weather balloon — one with an embedded Linux operating system. James Meehan writes . . .

“. . . Actually, the term 'weather balloon' might be a bit of a misnomer, because aside from the physical latex balloon, and the payload's ability to measure temperature, this project bears little resemblance to a traditional weather balloon. The design and engineering process encompassed more disciplines than anything I'd ever undertaken before — system engineering, software design, hardware design, basic electrical concepts, radio and RF engineering, and even some plumbing . . .”

“. . . In an integrated system like the one I decided to build, the flight computer controls just about every function of the payload. I'd read about some other groups that had built and launched balloons using a Basic Stamp from Parallax. I looked closely at the capabilities of the Basic Stamp and Basic Stamp II, but ultimately decided that they weren't flexible enough to do all the things that I wanted the flight computer to do, although I did end up using a Basic Stamp as the relay controller and A/D input (more about that later). Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the balloon should run Linux, that way I'd be able to have the flight computer do just about anything I wanted . . .”

” . . . Getting Linux installed and all of the hardware supported was more of a challenge than I expected. After mucking around with several different Linux mini-distributions, I settled on Bering, which has its roots in the Linux Router Project. Bering is really intended to be a turnkey distribution for an embedded Linux router or firewall, but it's suitable for most projects requiring a robust, flexible mini-OS . . .”

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