We’re happy to announce that we have dropped our average lead time from about a month to under a week. We were able to do this after the flurry of orders at the beginning of the year that allowed us to purchase a stock of Tracksoars. Previously we were building boards to order which meant lead times averaged 3 – 4 weeks while we built and tested the boards.

We are also in final testing of a new shield, an EEPROM shield with 2 megabits of storage, allows for up to  24 hours of GPS / Temperature / Humidity / Pressure data samples. The EEPROM shield will plug in to your computer and dump the EEPROM data via an FTDI header built into the shield and an open source program. This will allow for much more detailed data by allowing you to store samples gathered in between APRS transmissions. This will be very helpful for rocketry where flights only last a few minutes, as well as for weather balloon flights where more granular data is desired.

We are also working with members of the Tracksoar community to integrate some of our most requested features into the Tracksoar firmware. New features include burst altitude which, which will transmit the max altitude reached once apogee is detected, the ability to have the Tracksoar change APRS pathing settings automatically to prevent unnecessary load on the APRS network, and a few other updates and improvements.

Speaking of improvements since the launch of Tracksoar we’ve released two hardware revisions. The first was to move away from the now discontinued BMP180 pressure sensor and SHT21 temperature and humidity sensor to a single BME280 sensor which covers all three. This upgrade has allowed us to reduce wait and part count while continuing to offer the same quantity and quality of atmospheric data. We updated the JST battery connector to match the industry standard allowing for a wide range of battery packs to work without any modification. We;ve also made smaller incremental changes to improve the aesthetics and reliability of the Tracksoar.

We have lots more planned for the Tracksoar as we continue to work with our customers refine and improve our hardware and software.