High-Altitude Ballooning with a Raspberry Pi
skyPi allows a Raspberry Pi to send low-resolution images over SSTV from a
high-altitude balloon (or, optionally, the ground), while storing
high-resolution images locally.
First, install pip:apt-get install python-pip
Dependencies:pySSTV (install via pip)
Python Imaging Library (install via pip)
Compile gen_values.c to gen_values in the skyPi folder.
The following assumes the skyPi folder is in the pi user’s home directory.
Add @reboot sh /home/pi/skyPi/beacon.sh to the pi user’s crontab.
Add @reboot python /home/pi/skyPi/shutdown.py to root‘s crontab
to be able to safely shutdown the RPi by pulling GPIO pin 17 low. The RPi
is doing a lot of disk writes for the images, so unplugging it without shutting
down properly will probably result in unhappiness.
Python Imaging Library (PIL) is used to overlay the callsign. Put your callsign in beacon.py.
Connect a camera to RPi.
Plug audio cable into RPi’s 3.5mm output. Plug other end into something (ham
radio, laptop, garbage disposal, etc).
Boot RPi. It will periodically transmit SSTV images as audio over the 3.5mm
output. Default SSTV format is MartinM2. Many are supported.
1920x1080 jpeg images are saved in skyPi/run/, with a folder created for each time the beacon.sh
script is run, typically once per boot.
This project is based upon https://github.com/hsbp/rpi-sstv.