Some of you may have seen The Balloon Project, where these guys set off balloons with a camera attached to get an overhead view of San Francisco city. Well, those guys used bikes and radio transmitters to track down their balloon in the sky but there’s actually a better way to do it, use a Google Latitude-enabled Android phone such as Nexus One or even make your own DIY Arduino-based balloon GPS-tracking device.
I think this project has some merits if you can take it further with a motor and perhaps let the balloon be able to find its way home, all with remote camera, now that would make some really cool aerial photography device.
video://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtUjGdgMFOU
The Ferret is a high-altitude balloon tracking hardware package. Created by [Adam Greig] and [Jon Sowman], it uses an Arduino to gather NMEA data from a GPS unit, format the data into a string, and transmit that string on narrow-band FM. The project, built in one afternoon, is a tribute to the prototyping simplicity the Arduino provides.
