Tracksoar News

Hey everyone, earlier today we had our first bug free flight. We launched from just North of Gaviota, CA and tracked it up to a burst altitude of 108,000 feet before landing North of Buellton, CA. The flight went extremely smoothly, with the Tracksoar never missing a...

After our last launch we started on a campaign of further ground testing to see if we could replicate the loss of GPS location updates. We ran a half dozen cold soak tests using dry ice to drop the Tracksoar down to between -40 and -60 celsius, the usual range of...

I took a Saturday off from launching test balloons to sit down and really go over the Tracksoar. After a couple of hours of testing I was able to reproduce our big issue from the last flight; losing GPS updates at 66k feet. I spoke with the friendly folks at the...

After nearly a year in development we finally managed our first Tracksoar test flight. It has been a long process to get to this point but we finally have a version worthy of proper flight testing. We put the Tracksoar through it's paces in a number of ground tests,...

Over the weekend I made 4 of the Kickstarter prototype boards to be sent out for beta testing. These are the latest and greatest boards and except for a couple of minor changes will be the ones available for the Kickstarter.   Since I had a few spare boards laying...

As you can see we are back up and running. For those of you struggling to find a change, we have added an SSL cert so https://tracksoar.com now works. We added this in preperation for setting up an online store to sell the Tracksoar boards, components, and shields.

Hey Everyone, just a heads up, the tracksoar site will be down starting at 12:00am PST and may be down for a few hours. We are getting things ready for the post kickstarter sales and setting up an SSL cert for our forthcoming store.

We have received the latest round of tracksoar prototype boards. With this version we have removed the unused reset button and replaced it with an ICSP reset pad to resolve and issue we had with using the same reset pin for FTDI and ISP. Additionally we have our first...

  The latest round of prototype boards have arrived and here's one of them. The top layer is done with a solder stencil and paste, then parts placed by hand. THe smallest part is 0805 so its not too hard on the eyes. Once the top parts are placed the board goes...

Here is a screenshot from a brief tracksoar test at last month's Dayton HAMFEST, a prototype was carried around the event by a Santa Barbara Hackerspace member who attended.