Herein, please find a long-overdue update on the maiden flight of the Raspberry Pi in the Sky design that Craig Versek put together for LEAFFEST in September.

The Goal: live video from an aerial Raspberry Pi + wireless dongle + webcam. Any WiFi-capable device with a browser can log into the web page served by the device, and see what its camera is seeing.

Progress Report: With a lot of last-minute sweat, minimal tears, and no visible bleeding, Craig was able to get the device to transmit and receive the images, live, as the R-Pi-in-Sky dangled from a kite flown by Chris Fastie; on the ground, we had (at least) two laptops logged into a web page served by the R-Pi, and recorded video and stills on both.

Chris Fastie put together a fantastic video of the device being attached to a kite, and has included a montage of images that were broadcast by the device itself. Check it out here:

We'll hope to be updating this note with Craig's R-Pi code, and more technical details on the setup, soon.

Future Work: The transmission rate was a bit choppy. We think that with a directional antenna on the ground, we might do better.