About

Mission

This site, tracker, and utilities were created as a way to give back to the pico balloon community, as well as expand STEM teaching/learning opportunities for future generations to benefit from.

The hope is that more people are inspired to take up an interest in engineering and the sciences and find their own ways to be creative and share their experiences with others.

Everyone is welcome!

See the Big Idea page to get started.

Usage Policy

Following from the mission, this site, tracker, and utilities may not be used in for-profit activities. Volunteer only.

It is acceptable to recoup financial expenses you incur (eg purchase price of the tracker, shipping costs to send the tracker somewhere, etc).

Time spent assembling/preparing the tracker, teaching others, etc, is not acceptable to charge for.

Basically, if you're profiting while making use of resources from this site, this is not acceptable use.

History

The https://picoballoons.com site was the first version of a webpage to keep track of flights my father and I did together.

As time went on, the progress on making trackers and mapping utilities made more sense to have a dedicated project associated with them, hence Traquito.

The Traquito name is a combination of the word "tracker," (the pico balloon computer), and the Spanish diminutive suffix "ito," meaning small. Small tracker -- get it?? 😁

Am I Spanish? Nope! I just liked how it sounded!