Those Pico Balloons Again

I can sense the "what are you talking about?" questions in the air. 

Three years ago in February, after the headline Chinese Balloon Incident, I started looking into the responses, starting from the question, "Did The USAF Shoot Down a Ham Radio Balloon?" and first encountered the idea of hobbyists that made small or downright tiny balloons that they'd let ascend into the atmosphere and transmit a low power signal with some information that could be monitored wherever they happened to be. It eventually turned into a fairly long introduction to the topic of hobby balloons that go around the world. 

Again, that was over three years ago, and groups like the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade are still online, and growing. 

Earlier in the week, I came across an article on one of the forums I read where a guy, working on his own, had found a way to get a very lightweight balloon into the upper atmosphere - above most airline traffic - and it made me want to do a post about what he did. Maybe to encourage you, or maybe to encourage me. Let me show a map he posted showing the travels of his cheap little balloon. 

What I really want to show about this is the information in the upper left hand corner. I'll enlarge it, and add it here. 

While the big picture shows what appears to be around 3 laps, this says 3.821 laps - and much more impressive to me: 68 days and 8 hours floating around the world. Just above the bottom of the summary, it says the last altitude was 13.70 km - which converts to just under 45,000 feet: 44,948.

Now here's the embarrassing part. I dutifully saved this image but I apparently didn't leave myself a link to the source where he shows off the heart of the balloon, a folded piece of paper with a few solar cells to power it, and a few small printed circuit boards. They look professionally done, not hobbyist level, and that's telling me that they're probably among the many professionally designed and produced boards used by hobbyists for many things that the developers never dreamed of people doing. Which means I can't say "just do this" and you can launch your own pico-balloon.

I'll keep looking for that, and hope to be able to round it up soon.