The spice of life

The first purchase I made for project Icarus is the SPOT personal tracker for retrieval purpose.  The original price on this unit is $120, I was lucky enough to find it on Craigslist for $50. As I track along the different teams doing this project, one common theme I noticed is cost is never calculated accurately and doesn't reflect the true cost of doing this project. I realize it's probably because most people doing this are engineers and not business managers. No wonder when engineers are put in charge we always have cost over runs :) So in my documentation I will try to be as detailed as possible to reflect the true cost of doing this project. I will do this by separating the cost into fixed and variable costs, fixed costs in this case means re-usable parts such as the camera (hopefully), the styrofoam box, the parachute, and the SPOT personal tracker. The variable costs will be costs incurred per single launch, such as the balloon and the helium. Back to the SPOT tracker, the web interface is extremely easy to use, allows you to share your coordinates, create a web page for tracking and all your friends and family can track you via a web browser (not sure if that's a good idea).  Here's a screen shot attached. I will be performing various tests to ensure the unit is capable for our launch.