Awesome to see HAB on hacker news! Was following some of your development years ago when I developed a small APRS tracker, have been meaning to revisit that project someday. Also developed a WSPR version that I haven't published any info on, but had a great trans-atlantic flight with that one. Keep up the great work!
Started reading the article... and realized that it was about my favorite BBQ spot in my own hometown! Hope that they can find a way to continue operation.
SeaLandAire Technologies | Electrical Engineer | Jackson, MI | Full time | ONSITE
We're a small R&D company in Michigan that specializes in fast-turn prototyping and development of small autonomous systems (~6-foot autonomous boats, small UAVs, etc) and sensing systems.
We're looking for both an EE to join our autonomous boat team and an EE to work across other various projects. These positions involves PCB design (Eagle/Altium), C firmware development (ARM/STM32), and some Python scripting. We're looking for motivated engineers who will get to work with a small close-knit team in a rapid development setting.
Some background--emlid, the company that is producing this module, relied on Intel Edison modules for the compute power behind their RTK GPS products. The Edison modules were recently EOL'ed.
I would guess that this module is primarily being developed as a replacement for the Edison emlid's RTK products, and they are pitching it as a separate product as well to recoup some of the development costs.
Another consolidation this year: Dialog is buying Atmel, although Atmel is fairly small compared to the other big players in the microcontroller market.
I've been working on a balloon controller as well, although mine is incredibly bare-bones [1]. It only reports position, altitude, and temperature; but since it's so minimal it only weighs around 2 grams.
For your use case, you might want to consider a small external microcontroller that handles TNC functionality, this /might/ be smaller and more lightweight than a USB sound card.
Your payload controller software looks pretty awesome--nearly makes me want to launch a balloon with a full Linux single-board computer!
I've tested my code with the TNC-Black from Coastal Chipworks and it works well. Weight isn't a huge issue on my flight; I'm focused on high altitude photography. It's just more fun for me to do things in software whenever possible. I'd really love to do the mod/de-mod in pure Go. There is an interesting example of a modem in Go but I have much more learning to do before I could write one of these for AFSK:
Awesome tracker, by the way! I'm super jealous of guys like you with actual engineering skills that can put together a custom integrated package on a PCB like that. Would you consider putting up your schematics and Eagle files on Github or similar?
Definitely! I have a couple issues I need to fix on the hardware so the board runs without mods, but I plan on posting all of the hardware/firmware very soon once I get that wrapped up.
There's also an awesome command-line chromecast client which can play local and remote media. It works quite well in my experience. https://github.com/xat/castnow
I highly doubt growing coffee on a small scale will work for this application. Coffee trees typically take 2-3 years before they produce first fuit, and they mature into very large bushes/trees. A young coffee bush might make a good decoration, but will produce few if any coffee cherries.
http://protofusion.org/wordpress/2015/10/featherhab-2-gram-h...
http://protofusion.org/wordpress/2016/02/featherhab-source-c...