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Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

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Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#31

Post by tndl »

mbokinala wrote: post #19

Congrats on the launch! Seeing this reminded me of building and launching a high-altitude weather balloon with some buddies back in high school - one of the coolest projects I've gotten to work on. If it's not proprietary, I'd love to know - how do you "steer" vertically between different wind layers to move in the direction you want to go? Can't wait to see where you guys take this!

We think balloons are pretty cool too!

So I can't get into exactly how we do our altitude control, but the Google Loon project has a really great explanation of how they made their (very big) balloons go up and down: https://x.company/projects/loon/

Loon made all of their research public after they shut down, and we're obviously heavily inspired by their work. Our systems use a lot of the tech they pioneered, just on a much, much smaller scale (for reference, Loon's balloons were the size of tennis courts) Here's the PDF in case you're interested in checking out the 400+ page writeup: https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/The%...

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#32

Post by DAlperin »

tndl wrote: post #14
pagade wrote: post #11

To a layperson like me, could you explain how these balloons will be cleaned up / collected after their life? What material are they made up of?

Sure thing! They're made of about 300 grams of polyethylene. Towards the end of their lifespan, we can steer them to an area that's easy for us to drive out and pick them up. The payload has a GPS, which lets us track where they are both in the sky and on the ground. Right now, most weather balloons fall back to Earth and stay where they land unless someone happens across them (since they can't be controlled and only…

> we can steer them to an area that's easy for us to drive out and pick them up.

What does this look like in practice? As you mentioned I know you don't really have any lateral control, but I imagine you can wait for it to overfly somewhere convenient to descend?

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#33

Post by tndl »

jviotti wrote: post #17

Very cool! How are the balloons transferring telemetry back to earth for analysis, etc? Asking because my research at the University of Oxford was around hyper space-efficient data transfer from remote locations for a fraction of the price. The result was an award-winning technology ( https://jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com ) to serialise plain JSON that was proven to be more space-efficient than every tested alternative…

Let's definitely talk, we're using protobufs right now. I'll send an email

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#35

Post by tndl »

cstasuik wrote: post #29

Incredibly cool, thanks for sharing. Are you planning on hiring any time soon? Also, if you don't mind sharing, what designer/firm worked on your web and branding?

We're not hiring right now, but send me an email (austin@sorcerer.earth). And Max did the website, it's built on webflow

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#36

Post by tndl »

dev2point0 wrote: post #13

This is awesome, how do you manage climbing and descending with a balloon. Are you compressing the gas on board or using thermals?

How we make it go up and down is the secret sauce :) I'm a hangglider guy, so I'd love to be using thermals, but I can say that's not how we do it right now

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#37

Post by cstasuik »

tndl wrote: post #35
cstasuik wrote: post #29

Incredibly cool, thanks for sharing. Are you planning on hiring any time soon? Also, if you don't mind sharing, what designer/firm worked on your web and branding?

We're not hiring right now, but send me an email (austin@sorcerer.earth). And Max did the website, it's built on webflow

Will do, thanks! Also very cool, as a designer I always enjoy seeing a big emphasis on design out of the gate, and the brand does a great job of sticking to modern design trends while doing some things a bit differently.

Re: Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data

#40

Post by shagie »

DAlperin wrote: post #32
tndl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure thing! They're made of about 300 grams of polyethylene. Towards the end of their lifespan, we can steer them to an area that's easy for us to drive out and pick them up. The payload has a GPS, which lets us track where they are both in the sky and on the ground. Right now, most weather balloons fall back to Earth and stay where they land unless someone happens across them (since they can't be controlled and only…

> we can steer them to an area that's easy for us to drive out and pick them up. What does this look like in practice? As you mentioned I know you don't really have any lateral control, but I imagine you can wait for it to overfly somewhere convenient to descend?

I believe it is along the line of...

Pull up https://www.pivotalweather.com/model.php?m=nam&p=sfct-mean-i... and pick some point (note the 'click for point sounding'). You can see the wind direction at that location as a function of altitude.

Using this as a vector field, you can do "the balloon is here now, 30 minutes from now it will be there, if it is at altitude Z at that time, it will be follow the wind in this direction" which in turn allows you to predict where it will be in 30 minutes and take the forecast for that location at that time and determine what altitude you want to be at.

Saying I want it to be at X,Y at some time is solving this backwards. Which isn't necessarily easy, but it's computable.

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