At this moment we have assembled capsule and fitted the IR camera inside of it. The capsule is made from extruded styrofoam panel. Several screws and tape holds styrofoam together. Here you can see the capsule and rope mounts.

We teared down a laptop battery and extracted the li-ion cells. After recharging and discharging each of three battery pairs it appears that all three pairs still have about 70% of original capacity (2600mAh).

We got an GSM module for back-up tracking. It can be used to communicate with base station, as well as to determine coordinates of balloon.

Also we tried out 10DOF board, works good, but we will not be using this on the payload.

This is the quick overview of what we have been doing. We plan to make PCBs for sensors and com's. Follow us to get more frequent and detailed updates.