Welcome to Tracksoar, the open source APRS tracker

Coming to Kickstarter Friday October 4th At Noon Pacific Time!

We are putting the final touches on our Kickstarter campaign. Sign up for out mailing list at the top of the page to receive an announcement as soon as it goes live!

Our Story:

We at the Santa barbara Hackerspace have been involved in around a dozen weather balloon launches. We have had a lot of fun with these launches and learned a lot, but found some issues. Most of the commercially available APRS trackers are closed source, large, and heavy, all of which add to the complexity of launching a balloon. So we decided to do something about it, and the Tracksoar was born. The tracksoar is designed to be flown under anything capable of lifting 60 grams, including balloons, RC planes, quad copters, or anything else that flies. The Tracksoar uses the 2 meter radio band (144.390mhz) which requires an amateur radio license to operate.

Tracksoar has been developed and prototyped for nearly a year now and is finally ready for its debut. We have gone through several dozen iterations and almost a dozen prototypes. We have several prototypes of the version 1 board, which we hope to fly in the near future. Tracksoar is an open source project, and all source code, schematic and board files will be published with the kickstarter launch.

Tech:

The Tracksoar is built around the excellent and mature Trackuino project. We have modified their code and schematics and board a bit to make the Tracksoar as compact, lightweight, power efficient, and integrated as possible. The Tracksoar comes ready to nearly ready to fly, just add your Amateur Radio callsign and you’re ready to go.

The Tracksoar uses the vary mature and nearly ubiquitous APRS network for reporting data. APRS has been used by amateur radio operators for decades to send location and weather data. With sites like APRS.fi you can receive your Tracksoar data without a radio on any computer or smartphone.

Hardware:

Some Last minute hardware checks

The Tracksoar is built around an ATMEL ATMEGA 328P running the Arduino bootloader. It has a UBLOX MAX-M8Q GPS receiver for precise high speed location data, with a compact and lightweight chip antenna. In addition the board has a BMP180 barometric pressure sensor, SHT21 relative humidity sensor / temperature sensor, this sensor suite allows for precise atmospheric data. Tracksoar also makes several digital and analog pins from the MCU, as well as SPI/I2C busses using a standard pinout to allow the creation of daughter boards to make it easy to add new sensors. The Tracksoar also has a boost regulator to allow a range of power options, accepting between 1.5v and 5v from a battery pack. To get all this data to the ground Tracksoar has a 300mW 2 meter transmitter available in a range of frequencies for a number of countries.

Software:

The Tracksoar software is built around the open source Trackuino firmware, which is well developed and quite mature. We have modified it slightly to read data from the sensors and transmit it via APRS, as well as to accept location data from the MAX-M8Q GPS receiver.

And off it goes!