This is a guest post by Mike Hotchkiss of Raspberry Boom

Everyone loves gadgets and as technology advances there is always something new that gets people excited. The Raspberry Pi single board computer is probably one of the most fun and flexible devices out their, offering a ton of options and projects for people to jump into.

The company OSOP from Panama, gained huge success with their flagship product the Raspberry Shake, the world’s first affordable home Earth monitor and seismograph powered by the Raspberry Pi. With advancements in smart technologies and a keen interest from home users to have the latest weather stations and home monitors, it is easy to see why the Raspberry Shake has such appeal.

This year the Raspberry Shake team are back to launch a new device on the popular crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter and will even attempt to break a world record in the process.

The device named the “Raspberry Boom”, is a professional atmospheric home monitor that detects infrasound waves which are completely inaudible to humans and happen all around us, all the time! These low frequency sound waves travel huge distances and come from an incredible range of sources. Tech enthusiasts of all types can now uncover events from their own homes to discover sonic booms, rocket launches, strong weather patterns, volcanoes erupting, avalanches, meteors, explosions, animal calls and much much more!

The collaborators for this campaign are also pretty impressive, with one of the leading on board experts,  Jeffrey Johnson, working for over 10 years in infrasound and having built his own device which is used by NASA.

The Raspberry Shake team have built a reputation on providing professional monitoring solutions without the hefty price tag. Professional infrasound sensors and equipment traditionally cost thousands of dollars, so to create a device with comparable technology at an affordable price is phenomenal.

Perhaps one of the coolest things of the Raspberry Boom is how each device connects to one another on a live world map called Station View. Never before have so many interconnected infrasound devices been proposed publicly or privately. This would create the largest citizen science infrasound array on a world wide level.

For the launch itself the Raspberry Shake team have something truly unique planned. This is where expert solar balloon builder Daniel Bowman comes in. With his help, the Raspberry Boom will take a journey on a solar balloon into the stratosphere, where the absence of wind noise makes distant signals much clearer. Here they will test the device in a unique environment and in the process hope to break a world record for the altitude of the flight.

“Infrasound in the stratosphere remains mysterious. This flight will explore this virtually untouched region using a solar powered hot air balloon.  Not only that, if we manage to reach 30 km (100,000 ft), we will also break two world records in altitude, one for hot air balloons and another for solar powered flight. I’ve been waiting to try this for years, and now’s our chance to do something really spectacular!”  – Daniel Bowman

The Raspberry Boom is set to be another hit combining home monitoring with IoT technology. It is likely to attract attention from tech and gadget lovers alike, along with a more technical fan base of makers and hobbyist communities, citizen scientists and not forgetting the Raspberry Pi enthusiasts.

The Raspberry Boom is being released for pre order on Kickstarter on March 22nd. For a period of 30 days people will be able to pre order the device at prices well below retail and may even be lucky enough to snap one of the Early Bird specials up at an even bigger discount.

For details of the Kickstarter campaign visit:

http://raspberryshake.org/kickstarter-raspberryboom

Find out more about the company and their other products at www.RaspberryShake.org or by following their social networks @raspishake.

The post Raspberry Boom: An Atmospheric Monitor for More than just the Weather appeared first on Citizen Science Center.