Congrats on the interesting project! I was curious to know more about the scientific payload: how did you measure the fluorescence? Did you apply excitation light continuously? Or did you rely on ambient light and correct for it when measuring fluorescence? Did you have a control on earth to compensate for any biological related effects? UV and even blue light can stress or even kill cells, or bleach the fluorescence proteins. How do you expect altitude to influence fluorescence? It would be great to look at some data (could not find it on the blog, or github). Acrylic blocks a substancial portion of the UV light!

Edit: Definetely agree with other comment that the whole experience is more important than these details.

This is very interesting, would love to hear more about the algae based measurements.

Meanwhile in my attempt with High altitude balloon, I tried sending a whole image over Lora successfully of course in chunks.

https://codetiger.github.io/blog/sending-large-data-like-ima...

This is absurdly impressive. If you have any interest in doing some more flight software work in aerospace / space / missile systems, shoot me an email scott@orcrist.com

Keep doing amazing stuff and telling us about it. Very cool!

It's great that opportunities like this exist. Doing a project like this at all is such valuable experience. You must have learned a ton and can take that with you for all future projects. The only real quibble is the experimental setup is not really scientifically valid. UV light on its own kills algae, so you're going to detect a monotonic effect roughly equivalent to the altitude increase assuming a reasonably constant rate of altitude increase just from the cumulative exposure. That's not the same thing as detecting a change purely because of altitude.

Who cares, though? Scientists train for many years to learn the details of experimental methods in their specific domain. The engineering and hacking experience on its own is what really matters here.

the 1080p ->> 18x10 pixel compression just to yeet images over LoRA is honestly more impressive than the algae part

++++Cool points for that name alone!

This is so interesting. I have nothing to add, other than congratulations, and good luck on your next project.