Yesterday we had our final review for the Balloon Studio. JP and Oliver Yeh from MIT joined us for the review. We will be uploading all of the final projects under the studio page.

To boost our energy, we bought some dry ice to play with.

After playing around, we decided to do an art project with the dry ice. We mixed some yellow paint with the water and added the dry ice. Unfortunately, the bottle was too strong and did not explode. we will do more experiments tomorrow.

Hayley and Jeff have been working on the RC plane for the past 5 days.  We should have it running tomorrow.

We packed our stuff and headed to Julian’s site to test his huge kite/balloon. Since the balloon was so big, we decided to attach two cameras, a canon powershot and a flip. In retrospect, that was a bad idea since we did not test the balloon before.

And here is the balloon in the sky

Apparently the string got cut at the 500 ft mark. Here is Jeff and Julian running after the balloon

Here you could see the balloon as a small black dot in the sky. Hopefully some lucky guy has our cameras.

After testing their rigs at the harbor, students went back to the drawing board to design better ones. Nathan, from the D-Lab, joined us for the day. He brought the plastic welder so we could build balloon kites.

Jeff testing the plastic welder

Julian and Jeff discussing his newly designed kite/balloon

Mariah starting to work on her hot air balloon

And the most exciting moment of the day to see the huge balloon starting to rise

Danny decided to have the kids at the kindergarten test her kite.

Hayley starting to work on her RC plane

Since we have a limited supply of Hydrogen, Jeff has been experimenting with Hydrogen. Here are some early calculations to figure out how many aluminum cans are needed to produce enough gas to fill the balloon. (33.8 aluminum cans fills a 5-foot balloon)

Ready to generate hydrogen

Aluminum beginning to bubble

And some Hydrogen

Early in the morning, we packed our stuff and headed to Boston Harbor. Wind was around 7 m/h, which is good for the balloon.
First we had to carry the balloon all the way down through the parking garage. Four of us were protecting the balloon because we did not want it to hit the ceiling and explode.

Getting ready for the launch

And here are some images from the sky



The images above were actually the only ones that were not blurry. The wing was torn apart and that caused lots of turbulence. We need to do a better job with stabilizing the camera.

and here are two blurry images


And finally, we tried to launch the kite but we forgot the tail

We spent the day designing rigs for our second shoot. We were hoping to take sky pictures of the Tea Party rally in Boston Commons but we did not finish designing/making our rigs on time. Students used mostly foam and tape to make their rigs. We will be testing tomorrow morning.

Here are some images of our first day of the Balloon studio. The studio is taught by Jeff Warren and Seth Hunter from the Media Lab. We managed to fly the camera 3 times.
Jeff and Danny inflating the balloon using the gigantic Helium tank.

Listening to the weird noises coming from the big balloon.

Making sure the camera is well protected

Ready to launch but Mariah does not want to let go because she is worried about the camera

The balloon quickly rising, 1200 ft

All happy

And some images from the sky



Here are some more images from a different shoot. Unfortunately, we forgot to change the resolution so the pics are not good resolution but the shots are amazing.