Life & fun · November 22, 2025
I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon
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…
In plain words
StratoSpore is a high-altitude research payload that uses algae fluorescence to estimate altitude. Designed and launched by a high school student, the system combines a spectral sensor and Raspberry Pi with a trained machine learning model to correlate biological stress responses to atmospheric conditions. The payload also features custom image compression to transmit data over LoRA radio in near-real-time. The project includes open-source hardware designs and code documentation of the full engineering process.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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/stratospore I'm happy to answer technical questions about the payload, software, or anything else you are curious about! Critique also appreciated!
Does the same job
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A common open source approach to observability will begin with databases and visualizations for telemetry - Grafana, Prometheus, Jaeger. But observability doesn’t begin and end here: these tools require configuration, dashboard customization, and may not actually pinpoint the data you need to mitigate system risks. Coroot was designed to solve the problem of manual, time-consuming observability analysis: it handles the full observability journey — from collecting telemetry to turning it into actionable insights. We also strongly believe that simple observability should be an innovation…
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