One of the neat things about the ever-dropping price of technology is how people end up using off-the-shelf parts to create things that just a short time ago were the domain of government-funded organizations or large corporations.
Last year, one such project prompted governments into action as a man in New Zealand started to document his homemade cruise missle project.
A bit more on the benign side of things is this high-altitude unmanned glider project. Capable of being released from the edge of the atmosphere, such a glider could be used for all sorts of research, including a very cheap way of performing aerial surveys of remote areas.
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Gary, the phenomenal growth of community wireless networks is built on this principle: off the shelf cheap consumer hardware combined with open-source software distributed via the internet.
It make possible, dare I say it, cheap complex devices. 🙂
That part about the high altitudes obtainable via baloon kinda reminded me of the Bremser Spam. . .
http://wetmachine.com/c…