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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…

I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon launched on November 22, 2025 with 142 votes, #206 of 9,795 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.

Visit radi8.dev ↗Alternativestop 2% of November 2025

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

UpLink was a 491-gram high altitude balloon payload with a custom 3D printed enclosure, a LoRa image downlink, and two independent trackers. It reached the stratosphere, sent back hundreds of pictures, and we never recovered it.

In June of 2025, I worked with New England Sci-Tech as a part of Apex to launch StratoSpore : my first ballooning project. I used this opportunity to use algae as a biosensor for altitude, and I learned a lot in the process. Wanting to experiment in the stratosphere again, I worked with Sam Flynn to make a reliable and flight-ready payload. My plan for this post is to cover how I implemented these changes, along with documenting my learning process in hopes to inform my future launches. StratoSpore last year had two goals: examine how altitude/UV exposure affects algae fluorescence, and send images to the ground over a radio link. Historically, most high-altitude research teams use…from radi8.dev

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…

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