Who We Are

You may know the fear. You’ve worked hard to plan your mission. It’s all led to this day, the flight. Your only hope to recover it lies with the tracking system on board. And the dreaded result happens… The tracker fails. Everything you’ve worked for… is just gone.

That’s exactly where Habtronics began.

At age 10, Max Kendall lost his first high-altitude balloon exactly this way. But he didn't stop there…

Max learned about amateur radio, earned his radio license, started building his own APRS transmitters from open-source Arduino projects, and flew mission after mission, learning from every failure, never losing another balloon.

While working on new tracker designs, Max connected with the global high-altitude balloon community, and eventually found his way to a breakthrough: the Horus Binary protocol, developed by a scrappy group of Australian experimenters who were recovering government radiosondes and reflashing them with open-source firmware.

It worked better than anything else out there. Max became one of its loudest advocates, recovering radiosondes with his dad and reflashing them to transmit Horus Binary.

But the community still needed something more. Instead of having to track down and recover radiosondes, the community needed a purpose-built tracker, small enough for rockets, long range enough for high-altitude balloons. A tracker that is highly customizable and extensible, made for DIYers, tinkerers, and radio experimenters. A tracker that uses the Horus Binary protocol for its unparalleled efficiency and telemetry capabilities. So Max built it. Iteration after iteration, late nights in PCB design software, soldering components barely visible to the naked eye… until the Tiny4FSK was born.

He built it. The Tiny4FSK… fully open source, rigorously tested, and proven on missions flown by MIT, RIT, the Kopernik Observatory, and NEWBS… is the result of that obsession.

Today, Habtronics is a small family business run by Max and his father Seth. Max and Seth are founders of the New England Weather Balloon Society (NEWBS), based out of the New England Sci-Tech makerspace in Natick, MA, where they run the StratoScience Lab, training 10–20 students each year to design and launch high-altitude experiments and present at the local HamXposition convention. They teach Arduino robotics, host hackathons, and are deeply active in the New England amateur radio community.

We built Habtronics because this community deserves tools made by people who've actually lived the problem. We live for the thrill of a successful high altitude, long range flight and want to help others experience that thrill as well.

If that's you, you're in the right place.