Emutex weather balloon footage

Emutex Scholarship-winning project brings back stunning footage from space

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An image of Ireland from space as captured by Emutex Software Innovator of the Year Scholarship winner Gerard Prunty's successful weather balloon project

7 October 2014

This year’s winner of Emutex’s scholarship competition  used a combination of off-the-shelf electronics and a weather balloons to deliver some striking imagery from the stratosphere above Ireland. Fourth-year computer science student Gerard Prunty from UCC secured the title of Emutex Software Innovator of the Year for a weather sensor system powered by Intel’s single-board Galileo PC developerd with Emutex engineers.

Prunty’s system included a camera, instruments to record temperature (as low as 60 degrees celcius), air pressure, altitude and atmospheric pressure, as well as GPS and GSM technology to triangulate location.

The system was launched at at Met Eireann’s Valentia Observatory in Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry, attached to a helium weather balloon.

All data collected was recorded on an SD card and the unit’s position was communicated by text messages sent every minute to predict where the system’ would land after the balloon exploded.

The sensor system was recovered just outside Cashel in Co Tipperary, loaded with data and some stunning footage edited together in this video below.

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