As promised, here are some pictures I took of the launch of Spaceblimp-3.

This work by The Doctor [412/724/301/703] has been placed under the Creative Commons By Attribution / Noncommercial / Share Alike 3.0 License

I got up rather earlier than usual last Saturday morning (0600 EST5EDT) to get ready for another Spaceblimp launch by HacDC, this time from a location in semi-rural Maryland. I had just enough time to get Windbringer prepped, my doctor's bag packed, and the rest of the stuff I wanted to keep close by into my backpack when I got a phone call from Bjorn in the parking lot outside my apartment building, who would be driving the chase car this time around. We met up with Nick (who rode shotgun in the TARDIS last time) and then struck out …

HacDC will be launching Spaceblimp-3 from Maryland tomorrow morning. You'll be able to follow its progress on Twitter, or you can watch the balloon's positional telemetry on aprs.fi as long as it's in the air. If you'll be out and about (or you're just allergic to Twitter) but want to keep track of the balloon, text the words "Follow hacdcspaceblimp" to phone number 40404 and you'll receive text messages with periodic status reports.

HacDC has launched its test-type Spaceblimp for the Hackerspaces In Space competition! You can track it wherever you happen to be by following @hacdcspaceblimp on Twitter (where updates are posted every two minutes) or aprs.fi on the map.

A couple of months back I mentioned that HacDC had thrown its hat into the ring of the Hackerspaces In Space competition held by Workshop88. The past few months have been a whirlwind of activity designing and fabricating circuitry, running simulations, carving a number of chassis out of high density foam, installing hacked camera firmware and writing code for the microcontroller. Folks with much better engineering skills than I put together all of the interesting stuff - the microcontroller board, the transmitter, the camera controller, and stuff like that. Aside from helping wherever I could I spent most of my time …