Not Skype, Qik Video is the best real time broadcast app. People can just hit your homepage and see what's going on at anytime if you use Qik. With Skype we'd need specific usernames and you'd have to add us and we'd have to connect and blah blah. With Qik you just post a URL.

I think Virgin Air is going to beat you to it. The only difference is you will there in person and 500k dollars poorer. After looking at everything you did and the data you collected, I am amazed it got as far as it did.

Here is what you need to do in my opinion to make it work.

1.Get a skype app for the phone so you can transmit a live video feed instantly back for everyone to see.

2. Make it lighter by about 1/3. I don't thing you took into account the jet steam.
3. Your going to have to get a better GPS app than a ten min update if your using it to find the device.
4. Install a car theft GPS tracker in the unit so you can still find it if it fails.

So basically do everything the same but get GPS that updates quicker, or a car tracker GPS chip (about $100), take some of the heating pads out and install a skype app so we can see the whole process. Falling and all. Awesome idea and very entertaining to see work it.

This project sounds interesting and like a reasonable alternative to using rockets, but one concern I have is how you intend to find clear airspace for both the ascent and descent. I would be worried about sending something up high into the sky without letting anyone know first - what if you inadvertently ended up in a flight path at the wrong time? Unlikely, but not impossible. Also, even if nothing quite that drastic occurred, the FAA may spot your balloon and want to investigate where it came from. Maybe this is a dumb question that you figured out a long time ago, but how do you plan to make sure your balloon has a clear and legal flight path all the way up and back down?

What a cool idea, sending a smart phone into space. I hope things work out for you. I am also going into space with a sugar powered rocket: www.sugarshot.org
and a balloon launched rocket: www.teamprometheus.org
Good flying to you,
Rick

Well done in receiving the funding. I hope you make something awesome out of this :)

Wow ! This is such a great and crazy idea! Too bad i haven't had it :-) If you may ever need assistance with the developement of your program i'll be glad to help :-)
Best luck and a lot of fun from Germany !
Ben

P.S.: Can't await to see what pics it might take on its trip!!

I wish you and your awesome project all the best, from The Netherlands

Hi there! I was so excited when I read about your project over at Mashable! I dropped you an email at the address you gave to Chris below. Would love to hear from you!

thanks Gina Trapani and Leo laporte and twit this is a sweet project I like the donate left over money also! Id be prod to back Danny Pier in any project!!

Thanks to Gina Trapani for pointing out this project! I've seen some similar efforts and felt jealous of those who were able to be involved. If you need any help, Danny, I'd love to volunteer - I'm in Boulder and have quite a bit of free time in the next month or so. Best of luck with the project!

Cool project! Best of luck.

This looks like such a great project, and I'm glad Gina mentioned it on TWIG - I haven't been watching Kickstarter very closely and I would not have known of it otherwise. Congratulations on meeting your target Danny!

Good luck Danny, it's a really cool project and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it now that it's fully funded.

Good luck Danny... Glad you made it... I have an HTC EVO also, so it will be cool to see this work.

Really happy to see you reached your goal, I found out about this project from Gina Trapani on This Week in Google, can't wait to see how it all goes. Good luck and here's hoping you have fun along the way. :)

It's nice to see that the goal was reached. I found out about this project from Gina Trapani on TWIG. Sounds like a great project, I can't wait to see the results.

No need to wonder if you'll get the funding in time... DONE.

There is probably few words of encouragement that would be as appropriate as this:

Make it so.

Hey, I'm a CU Boulder student here with a Nexus One and a love of space. If you ever need local help let me know, and I'll see what I can do.

http://alexandersollie.com/

My friends and I did basically the same thing for ~$150 based on the design from this website made by a group of MIT students: http://space.1337arts.com/

I'm curious about your thought process:
Why are you set on sending a smartphone into space as opposed to the cheap phone+camera combo used in the Icarus project? It seems unnecessarily expensive to use a smartphone...and once this app is developed will people be willing to send their nice smartphones into space, especially with the risk of never getting it back?

I posted this over on phandroid, but then saw your comment that you posted yesterday. I'm cross-posting here for consolidation.

GPS altitude restriction (60,000ft) will be something to be worked on. Difficult to simulate on the ground to see what the GPS unit does above the restriction (and if it self-recovers w/o power cycle). From what I’ve read online, the DoD spec says the GPS unit should be non-functional at 60kft AND 999knots, but many go non-functional at 60kft OR 999knots. (Think Boolean AND and OR, not common English usage AND and OR.) Also, how the GPS unit goes non-functional is not defined. I don’t know of a method of finding this out for the EVO 4G beyond actually contacting HTC directly and hoping the person who reads your email is interested enough to help you off the record. See http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/gps-module-for-high-altitude and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gps#Civilian for a couple of my sources on this issue.

For altitude above the 60kft, you might be able to rig a dirty pressure sensor by having a small fan blow on the mic and guesstimate the pressure by the sound of the air-flow across the mic.

From my experience on scientific balloon flights up to about 130,000ft a simple, fail-resistant method of parachute deployment is to have the balloon attached to the center of the parachute. Then have the payload hanging below the parachute. That way during ascent, the weight of your payload helps keep the parachute closed, but ready to deploy once the balloon pops and everything starts falling.

I don’t know what G-Forces you should expect, but for our flights we have a design rating of 10Gs for when the parachute opens. (At 130kft there isn’t enough air to inflate the parachute, or provide air resistance during falling. Thus it accelerates to quite a high speed by the time the parachute opens. When the parachute finally fully inflates it quickly slows everything down, thus the 10G load rating for the payload.) Once you look up/calculate what sort of parachute loading you should expect, test out your parachutes from a car (preferably with someone else driving), to make sure it won’t rip.

If you have any technical questions (and won’t sue me for poor or mis-interpreted information), feel free to email me back.

I'm backing and excited that you're so passionate about it. My family lives in Boulder, so if you need a crew helper just let me know!

I think maybe it's possible to get the raw GPS data from the device, so it might be that the margins of error become high once you pass some very high altitude. I seem to recall that GPS devices tend to have some form of restrictions built in for reasons of - well, national security I guess. Something about 60,000+ feet and 900+ knots ground speed, or something similar. So i guess the real question is, what artificial limits are posed by the chip in the phone?

The concern I'd have about temperature woudl not be freezing so much as possible overheating once the air thins out. It will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe the two effects will offset each other!

Excited to watch.

You might want to get in touch with Noisebridge. They're working on an Android app for weather balloon telemetry already:

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Icarus

Drop Robert Harrison an email to see how he got around the GPS problems.

I would think GPS and cellular reception could have problems at the higher altitudes, but it the app is written to handle this, it could start communicating again once is has come back down (provided is lands in a Sprint coverage area). I am backing this experiment!