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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

#41

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

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?

Due to the rotation of the earth, wind current direction rotates based on altitude. If you want to go in a particular direction, you ascend or descend to a altitude that has winds blowing in that direction.

At least, that's how I understand hot air balloons "steer".

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

#42

Post by darknavi »

tndl wrote: post #38
simjnd wrote: post #26

> These conditions make the stratosphere a very difficult place to deploy to prod This sentence is legendary

Every once in a while things go spectacularly wrong up there and we kick ourselves for not doing a b2b saas

> b2b

You are, as long as you mean balloons to business

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

#44

Post by tndl »

shagie wrote: post #40
DAlperin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Pretty much this. We add the data the balloons themselves are collecting to make things more precise as well

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

#46

Post by leeoniya »

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…

> JSON BinPack is space-efficient, but what about runtime-efficiency?

> When transmitting data over the Internet, time is the bottleneck, making computation essentially free in comparison.

i thought this was an odd sales pitch from the jsonbinpack site, given that a central use-case is IoT, which frequently runs on batteries or power-constrained environments where there's no such thing as "essentially free"

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

#48

Post by lormayna »

tndl wrote: post #30
lormayna wrote: post #27

As someone that is involved in catching radiosondes, this is quite cool!

Thanks! Let me know if you want to chase ours sometime.

Yes, this would be really interesting! Are they using VHF frequencies as the actual radiosondes (Vaisala, etc.)?

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

#50

Post by jviotti »

leeoniya wrote: post #46
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…

> JSON BinPack is space-efficient, but what about runtime-efficiency? > When transmitting data over the Internet, time is the bottleneck, making computation essentially free in comparison. i thought this was an odd sales pitch from the jsonbinpack site, given that a central use-case is IoT, which frequently runs on batteries or power-constrained environments where there's no such thing as "essentially free"

Fair point! "Embedded" and "IoT" are overloaded terms. For example, you find "IoT" devices all the way from extremely low powered micro-controllers to Linux-based ones with plenty of power and they are all considered "embedded". I'll take notes to improve the wording.

That said, the production-ready implementation of JSON BinPack is designed to run on low powered devices and still provide those same benefits.

A lot of the current work is happening at https://github.com/sourcemeta/jsontoolkit, a dependency of JSON BinPack that implements a state-of-the-art JSON Schema compiler (I'm a TSC member of JSON Schema btw) to do fast and efficient schema evaluation within JSON BinPack on low powered devices compared to the current prototype (which requires schema evaluation for resolving logical schema operators). Just an example of the complex runtime-efficiency tracks we are pursuing.

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