Set up and stuff!

Today the 6110 I ordered for myself came, as well as the serial cable I need to interface it with my PC.

I then hooked it up to my computer to see if it worked, whether I was able to send messages with it and everything else I might want to do.

I then got ready to go to my University interview, but didn’t feel well so I decided to stay home and I now need to reschedule, assuming I’ll be able to have one with them, since the only other available date coincides with one of my exams, however this University is within greater London, which means that I may be able to get there assuming my exam ends when I think it does, if not I won’t be able to make it again. This isn’t a great loss though as I don’t really want to go there but it’s best to keep my options open just in case.

I ended up staying at home, and topped up £10 onto a SIM card I had lying around in my desk for this purpose, which gives me 300 (299 now) free texts and £10 of credit, which should be more than enough to relay GPS data once every minute to two minutes, especially when you consider that they lose reception once above a certain altitude.

This is assuming that my free texts don’t expire which they presumably don’t, even if they do £10 is ample credit for sending out text messages at somewhere around 10p per message.

Let’s see, now I just need to get two GPS units, one of which will probably be OEM, a container, weather balloon, board I want to run Linux/*BSD from to control it all, various sensors, some cheap cameras etc. Oh and the ability to legally launch one of course.