Student sends cameras skywards

Enkhuizen and Friesland viewed from the balloon. (Photo: Tim Zaman)

TU Delft student Tim Zaman successfully completed a remarkable hobby project. Last summer he launched a helium balloon loaded with cameras and controls.

August 1, early afternoon on the Afsluitdijk. On a strip of land situated between the Waddenzee and IJsselmeer, a small, blue Volkswagen drives in a northeasterly direction toward Friesland. Tim Zaman (22) sits in the back with a laptop on his knees. He is studying the gps-tracks on the screen while giving directions to a friend driving the car. Zamans girlfriend films their adventure from the passenger’s seat.

At a small camping site halfway along the thirty kilometre-long dike, they stop the car, get out and try to hitch a ride on one of the moored speedboats. The last text message Zaman received from his onboard computer indicated a splash down position some kilometres south of the dike in the middle of the lake. He promises a boat skipper a full tank of fuel if they succeed in retrieving the payload.

Roaring over the water, with Zaman sitting in front doing the navigation via laptop and iPhone, the skipper scans the water in front of them. Unable to make himself heard over the roar of the engine, Zaman simply waves his arm towards the calculated direction. The skipper sees it first: a whitish block bobbing on the small waves. Once they reach the object, Zaman lifts the aluminium foil covered polystyrene box out of the water, removes the duct tape and peers inside. “It’s dry”, he shouts. “Look! It still works.” A green LED indicates that the onboard computer survived both the impact and the subsequent floating in the water. Zaman grabs one of the cameras from the box and browses through the photos. They’re all green-coloured. Zaman is disappointed, fearing the image chip may have been damaged by the altitude or the fall. The skipper however suggests the camera has been photographing underwater, as recognises the familiar colour of the turbid waters. Frantically, Zaman browses further back in time and finds photos taken from high up in the sky. From 30 kilometres up, the photos look as if they were shot from space. Zaman is ecstatic: his project is a complete success, and a remarkable one at that, considering the total cost of the payload: 220 euros.

For Zaman, the entire project began as a way of doing something fun with his Arduino electronics board, a low-budget programmable microcontroller which can pick up both digital and analogue signals and process the information into an output. As a student teaching assistant for a laboratory course at the faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering, Zaman was familiar with the so-called Labox, made by the Delft Centre for Systems and Control, which is a versatile box, featuring various input and outputs, that is somewhat larger than a shoebox. When Zaman discovered the tiny Arduino card, which fits in any USB-slot, he immediately wanted to play around with it. After a while, though, the LEDS and bleepers from the starters’ kit started to bore him, so he set in pursuit of a larger project: a box with three hacked, secondhand cameras (horizontal film, photo series and vertical spy-cam). Two gps modules, a radio transmitter and a gsm-phone were all hooked up to the Arduino card and took care of the communications, enabling Zaman to retrieve the camera cards.
Looking back on his successful project, Zaman says: “We learn a lot of things at the university, but this project made me feel I could really do something new.”

Photos, films and more on www.hollandshoogte.nl

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