Just a heads up that the website here at http://ulcape.org is still moving along slowly into the twenty-first century.

You may have noticed the new twitter widget in our sidebar. Well, that’s because we now have a twitter account.  You can follow us at http://twitter.com/ulcape.  Oh, and you may have noticed a few other tweets in the sidebar; the widget contains tweets from @ull_eece and @ulcape as well as any tweets with the #ulcape tag or which contain the word ulcape.

So, that’s all for now.  Enjoy our new features, follow us on twitter, facebook and linkedin and share the news with all of your friends.   Thanks for stopping by.

This is just to highlight some of the new features available on the website.  One of the more prominent features for our mobile users is the shiny new interface for iPhones, Blackberry’s and a few other mobile devices.  The mobile AJAXiness goodness comes from the guys at BraveNewCode.

Another feature for all of our users include the social bookmarking links at the bottom of this post and any other news post.  This is the social web after all.  So, we at CAPE offer you, the reader the chance to spread some link love with all of your friends real or not.  There are also options for saving to PDF and printing in the lineup as well.

Some of you may have noticed the little snippet above has been around for a while now.  Unfortunately our feedburner was not actually configured to allow email subscriptions so entering your email address just led to an error screen (shame on us). Fortunately, the situation has been rectified with a few simple steps you can subscribe to updates from our website.  You will receive an email anytime a new post is made to the website, but never more than one email a day.  So feel free to enter your email address, sign up and stay up to date.  The email subscription is ran by Google’s FeedBurner and CAPE will not have access to your email address to send you anything including spam. You will just have to trust Google to not be evil.

Lastly, there has been some work done on the wiki side of our website as well. There is no screenshot because it is in nowhere near it’s final state as far as looks are concerned.  However, the behind the scenes foundation is being laid to integrate the wiki (at least visually) with the main site you are viewing now.  Also, much of the important content has been ported over by Wade and myself including the PIC tutorials that were so popular.  All in all, the website is slowly progressing to a unified tool for CAPE to reach the public with.

That just about covers the changes around the website.  Just be sure to check out the photo gallery for some new (well, old) photos from the CAPE team circa 2004.  In the next couple days there should be some more albums from the CAPE-1 days as well.

Sputnik Lite: Teaching Science With Balloons

In addition to building satellites, Nick and students from CAPE are actively seeking future satellite builders and engineers even in elementary schools.  One method of reaching these students and getting them involved in science is through the Sputnik Lite balloon launch.  A small radio transmitter is attached to a helium filled party balloons and released.  The transmitter then sends down pulses of RF to relay temperature information to a groundstation.  Students then decode the temperature information to observe the changes in temperature over altitude.

Temperature vs. Altitude of a Balloon

Nick’s presentation and spreadsheet are available here:

• balloon-sputnik-light-09-06-02.pptx
  
• balloon-09-06-03-0623.xls

Here are a few videos from the balloon launch. The first two are from the launch and the second two are from just before recovery.

Oh, did I mention we have a ULCape Youtube Channel? Stay tuned for more video and pictures from the launch.