 Rhaid fawr, rhaid fawr. I'm a member of Derby Makers, which is an eclectic group of people who turn up at our host where we live, in Verticomers, at the Radio Communications Museum of Great Britain, which you won't have heard of, because it's not yet open in Derby. And it's got basically about two rooms this size full of radio gear. And there's another room somewhere else with the same amount. So it's got quite a lot of exhibits. We've moved in because our normal home has been heritage, lottery-funded, upgraded, trashed, rebuilt, everything. So we needed a temporary home. High-altitude balloons, to give them their normal name or HABS, are a hobby. They are a fun thing to do. They're aimed at getting youngsters and non-technical people involved in technology. They're based around Raspberry Pi's, correction. The ones we do are based around Raspberry Pi's, but if your hardware preferences for something else, that's fine, you can do what you like. We have Exhibit A, which is a bakewell pudding, because you always send these things up with a Raspberry Pi camera, wide-angle lens, taking nice pictures of the curvature of the earth, and a friend of mine sent one up with a Raspberry pudding on it because someone else sent one up with a model of a US astronaut recently. So there was a little bit of who can do what, and it went up, and the electronics failed. He has no idea where it went. All the telemetry failed, no latitude, longitude, no height, no receiving real-time telemetry, which is what we all depend on. It's gone somewhere. So if you find a box about that big that says, please ring this number 10-pound reward, please do. He'll be very interested. It did make the local BBC news with Radio Derby, and because of that it actually made the real BBC news, the six o'clock news one evening, I'm told. The school is overjoyed at the amount of publicity they've got out of it. He's miffed because he's lost a payload, but at the same time the children involved enjoyed it. The 10 milliwatts comes from the Civil Aviation Authority and OFCOM, not allowed to broadcast anything that might upset commercial aviation. This is a straight lift off the internet. The Laura Wann spec is for low power. Yeah, I think we meet that one. Wirelessly, yep. Battery, yes. There's only one make of lithium batteries that works, because you'll see in the later slide that the temperatures that these things go up to is minus 50, minus 60, minus 70, depending on what the weather's doing. Yes, it's an internet of things, and it does move. And there's a collection of Laura Wann gateways around the country, which feed back to a central website, which in real time displays the telemetry that various balloons are transmitting. 10,000 metres gates, which is roughly 30-something thousand feet, is civil airliner territory. Balloons go up higher, spy aircraft go up higher, but not as high as balloons. Technically, this is not outer space, but if you were to pop out at that altitude without space, you'd die very quickly. We live right down the bottom, and 100,000 feet is approximately 30 kilometres, or 30,000 metres. Though the dates are on the next slide. Felix Baumgartner, 2012, I think it was 2013, something like that, got sponsored by Red Bull to go up as high as he possibly could. This is a generated image. I don't think there was a photographer up that sort of altitude, sadly. And jump. So he got up to 40 kilometres in 2012. Someone since has got up a bit higher, just because they wanted to. And the stratosphere is at about 30 kilometres. Blackbird, the US retired reconnaissance aircraft, gets up to about 25 kilometres. Temperature is minus 70-ish at the altitude, beginning to come back up a bit, but the pressure is almost zero at that altitude. So here you see exhibit A. That's what a high altitude balloon looks like. They're about that big at ground level. They go up to six to eight metres full altitude before they burst. And then you hope that the payload and parachute and telemetry all work, and you can track it and recover it and do it again. Helium bottle. And you can see the telemetry is telling us that it's somewhere between 150 and 200 metres up. And that's the latitude and longitude of Dave's back garden. Typical configuration is a helium balloon with a parachute, either 18 inches, two foot or three foot, depending on how heavy your payload is. The one we're going to launch is going to be about 500 grams. So it's a two foot diameter parachute. Mostly you have one payload, but if you want a second payload, they're in series. That distance is five metres. That distance is 10 metres. There's no legislation around that. It's just a pragmatic rule of thumb, and it seems to work. It's wonderful what you can find on Google. Someone was incredibly lucky and got a few seconds or so after burst. And that's what your balloon looks like after it's gone pop. Obviously there's bits all over the place. Now that, and I don't know how well that's visible at the back. If it's not, sorry. That's Google Maps. The central website had Hub. Imaginative names we use. Various people have their own trackers, and you can see one there. You can see ours in Derby. Someone else there. Plust around London. One over in the Movens. I helped at a launch that was launched from the Movens show ground. It went up, and because of various factors which weren't obvious at the time, but became obvious afterwards, the balloon did not go up as fast as we had expected it to, and instead of it going up in a trajectory sort of like that, parachute, and then down, it took a much greater time to get up to burst altitude. It burst, but it burst the far side, a bazing stoke from here, which is about down there, and the parachute, we watched the payload disappearing out over the English Channel. Oh, we were overjoyed at that one. But there was some slight hope, because everybody always puts, if you find this, there's a £10 reward. Please ring this phone number on it. And a school did a launch about two years ago, and recently the payload turned up on a beach in Denmark. I have no idea why it took that long. I'm not a climate, a tides person. So this is what the telemetry things. There's a nice little icon that tells you you're under balloon flight. This is 1900 metres, latitude, longitude, time of clock in system, and that's the view as you're going up. There are two techniques used to transmit Laura Wann and RTTY. RTTY only sends bits in sense of altitude, longitude, latitude. It doesn't send slow scan television pictures that Laura Wann enables you to send one every four minutes. It does mean that whatever happens to your payload, you do get a view of what's going on, and you can see much more clearly. The images are all written to the SD card, which is one of the reasons why you want to recover your payload. Same flight, 42,000 metres, going well up, nice curvature of space, well above the clouds, and you can see the picture is beginning to drop packets. The telemetry is beginning to hit its limits, and that's when it was recovered some hours later. The person who was doing the flight, he was going for the height record, that's the parachute, that's the fence, the road is here and that's the recovery vehicle. My understanding is that is an uncommon occurrence to be that neat. They land on people's garages, they land on the roofs of multi-storey buildings, they land in military ranges, they have a mind of their own because they are at the whim of the weather on the day. Before you launch, you go to a particular website, put all your data into it, and it does some magic and it gives you a predicted route, which is surprisingly accurate. It's accurate on a sample of one launch that I've been involved with, accurate to within half a kilometre. One of my colleagues is busy putting a SMS unit, a single chip unit in our payload, so that at about 1,800 or 3,000 feet, whatever it is, when it's got a cell, I love his optimism when it's got a cell. I live in Derbyshire. Up in the Peat District, there are places where you go, ooh, my phone's got a signal, isn't that unusual? But that's part of the fun-ish. The central website, as I said, is called Hab Hub. It is an absolute font of all knowledge. It's been created by the community. It is absolutely wonderful. You will lose if you start getting interested several evenings, just reading it, understanding the jargon, and beginning to understand how it all hangs together. This is one of the diagrams that says, this is what you will have to build, this is what you need, and these are the key dependencies. So for someone like me who was an aerospace apprentice, that's great because it means that we can start generating free-flight checklists, which my cell likes, because that's what we used to do. What all it says is microcontroller, it doesn't matter which one you use. Some people prefer arduinos, some people prefer raspberry pies. If you're feeling slightly rich and very lazy, we are for Flight One. I insisted I wanted flight-tested stuff because the unknown is us as a project team, not the electronics. We bought a commercial unit called PITS, Pi in the Sky, and that simply does all of the stuff that you need. It is proprietary, but the software is available for free, and you can muck around with it to your heart's content. It comes with a Pi Zero, so the weight of the payload is usually made up with Haribos, because they're a nice pack of people like them, and if you've got lots of youngsters involved, the idea of eating a sweet that's been into space is something that they rather like, I'm told. Those are the batteries that work. There's a gotcha around UPS chips. The U-blocks one, and they're quite a sensible firm because of the different project I was involved in, they don't block the functioning of the GPS chip when it gets above a certain altitude. That used to be part of the arm's munitions rules so that you couldn't buy a chip and build your own ICBM. You can have as much open source stuff as you want, or as little as you want. One of my colleagues is building one of... There's an add-on board for the Raspberry Pi that only has a Loroan chip, so that's about £20 or something, and he's trying to make that work, and he's obviously at a needed GPS and a radio unit and a couple of other bits, but his goal is to see how cheap he can make it. I can't emphasise it enough. If you are interested, be prepared to lose some serious time reading that website. It really is good. Right, now the slide I didn't put up because I was only doing it in the hotel room yesterday is you can't just launch a balloon because you feel like it. You actually have to ask the Civil Aviation Authority for a permission to launch. There is a form, of course. It turns out I discovered yesterday there are two forms. I have no idea why there are two forms that you can use. Both have seemed to ask the same thing almost. One says, have you talked to the police? Yesterday I kept trying our local police station on the phone. It was always engaged and I gave up after ten times. It's free, but then it generates what is in the trade called a NOTAM, notification of air traffic movement. There is a wonderful website that pulls all of these off, drops them on Google Maps and shows you where they all are. Otherwise you manually have to sit there with your own map, physically hand marking them all up. The ICO do it, the CAA do it that way because most of their customers are the airlines, the MOD, and they've got all the processes set up. It's just hobbyists who don't. You have to submit the form one month before your flight and during the week before your flight you have to contact the department to check that you still have your assumption you've got permission to check that that assumption is still valid and that they're publishing a NOTAM because what they do is say this is a three kilometre exclusion zone. Be aware that there will be a balloon launch on this date between these times, you tell them the times. We've gone for 10am to 4pm. I know Bristol Balloon Festival has a big lift off at 5 or 6 in the morning because the air is nice and stable then. None of us ever think that anyone will get up that early for this sort of stuff so we don't do that, we do it during the day. I've also requested a day the next weekend in case the weather does its usual British thing or you get up and you discover it's too windy or it's raining or typical summer problem. Fingers crossed we'll be doing this in a month. I had hoped that our first launch would coincide with today that hasn't happened for all sorts of reasons basically including holidays because it's a community project. It's not like running being a project manager at work. I have to remind myself I am not a project manager, I'm a cat herder. It operates differently. The people involved suddenly go on holiday, get ill, change their minds all sorts of things that human beings do. Quite good fun really. But if you are interested, I'm running, at least I think I'm running a workshop tomorrow. That's me done, any questions?