I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon
Details
- External ID
- 46016288
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon
- Website domain
- radi8.dev
- Launched
- Nov. 22, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 142
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9301310043668122
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN - My name is Andrew, and I'm a high school student.This is a write-up on StratoSpore, a payload I designed and launched to the stratosphere. The goal was to test if we could estimate physical altitude based on algae fluorescence (using a lightweight ML model trained on the sensor data).The blog post covers the full engineering mess/process, including:- The Hardware: Designing PCBs for the AS7263 spectral sensor and Pi Zero 2 W.-The biological altimeter: How I tried to correlate biological stress (fluorescence) with altitude.- The Communications: A custom lossy compression algorithm I wrote to smash 1080p images down to 18x10 pixels so I could transmit them over LoRA (915 Mhz) in semi-real-time.The payload is currently lost in a forest, but the telemetry data survived. The code and hardware designs are open source on GitHub: https://github.com/radeeyate/stratosporeI'm happy to answer technical questions about the payload, software, or anything else you are curious about! Critique also appreciated!
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Energy & climate
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- bio-sensor for weather monitoring
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No This project requires physical high-altitude balloon instrumentation, biological handling and culturing of algae, hardware sensor integration, and novel biological experiments.
What it would actually take: A real build requires specialized aerospace and bioengineering equipment: high-altitude weather balloons, stratospheric avionics, GPS tracking, and custom photometers/fluorometers to excite and measure chlorophyll fluorescence in sub-zero, near-vacuum conditions. It additionally requires wet-lab biology expertise to culture and calibrate algae response against altitude metrics, alongside physical launch regulatory compliance (e.g., FAA FAR 101).
Discussion
13 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: LoRa alternatives (WeNet mentioned), AS7273 spectrometer
Concerns raised: Acrylic blocks UV light, compromising fluorescence measurements, Experimental setup not scientifically valid for isolating altitude effects, UV exposure itself kills algae, confounding altitude-related results, GPS not working, had to use external altitude data, Bandwidth usage for image compression vs. additional sensor data tradeoff
Feature requests: More sensor data collection instead of image compression, Better spectrometer setup for accurate fluorescence measurement
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 85 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #12 of 86 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 21 days after the earliest competitor.
- Weather balloon to the stratosphere with a Raspberry Pi computer · hn · 2026-08-10 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- We chased a weather balloon across Montana and never found it · hn · 2026-08-20 · 60 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- LiDAR-APR-SCR-Results · github · 2026-09-23 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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- Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing · hn · 2026-02-03 · 64 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Submarius · hn · 2026-06-20 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- WebGCM · hn · 2026-09-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Horizontal yet.