Friday, April 1
Dave and I are sitting in the office. Dave is fighting with a small pile of things connected to an Arduino and stuffed into a foam box. He's trying to make a servo move a camera mounted on the side of the box up and down at regular intervals, because he is hoping that if (when!) we launch a balloon carrying the foam box tomorrow, he'll be able to capture high-resolution video of the balloon popping somewhere around a hundred thousand feet.
I don't know shit about electronics.1 When (if!) we launch and track the balloon, my contribution is probably going to be split between going along for the ride and some extraordinarily bad Perl that will pull coordinates out of strings produced by the payload (and broadcast at 50 baud) and turn them into something we can look up on a paper map.
1 Although pretty much my every waking (sober) hour now seems to be dedicated to a system for selling them to people like Dave.