Show HN: I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon

2 points by radeeyate a day ago

Hi HN - My name is Andrew, and I'm a high school student.

This is a write-up on StratoSpore, a payload I designed and launched to the stratosphere. The goal was to test if we could estimate physical altitude based on algae fluorescence (using a lightweight ML model trained on the sensor data).

The blog post covers the full engineering mess/process, including:

- The Hardware: Designing PCBs for the AS7263 spectral sensor and Pi Zero 2 W.

-The biological altimeter: How I tried to correlate biological stress (fluorescence) with altitude.

- The Communications: A custom lossy compression algorithm I wrote to smash 1080p images down to 18x10 pixels so I could transmit them over LoRA (915 Mhz) in semi-real-time.

The payload is currently lost in a forest, but the telemetry data survived. The code and hardware designs are open source on GitHub: https://github.com/radeeyate/stratospore

I'm happy to answer technical questions about the payload, software, or anything else you are curious about! Critique also appreciated!