How We Started Building Resoloon
🎈 Our Ascent: How We Started Building Resoloon
The Stratospheric Dream: A Builder's Story of Resoloon
The story of Resoloon really began for me about two and a half years ago with a simple, frustrating realization: satellite imagery was far too expensive. That moment was the spark; I knew there had to be a better way to get high-resolution intelligence. Of course later we identified that this is not that simple, but it was a great realization to start from.
The first year was pure, heads-down engineering. It was a period of intense technological experimentation, developing two initial devices and running critical trials. I poured everything I had into those first few months, focusing on the communication, hardware, and image processing outlined in my paper. The hard work paid off when we launched three test flights, and two of them were completely successful. Suddenly, this ambitious idea of building complex stratospheric systems, my solo mission, was real, and it was time to move beyond.
During these test flights I got a lot of help from my family and friends - launching a balloon filled with 3 m3 hydrogen is not a one man show.
The Community That Built the Team
A successful prototype, however, is just a machine. To turn it into a world-changing mission, I needed a team. The shift from a solo pursuit to a company began through serendipitous meetings. I already knew Matteo from some fun projects we’d done, and when I first visited the builderspace he and Janos had founded, I was just looking to talk shop.
What I found was magic: a community of incredibly talented, like-minded builders. The energy was electric. They didn’t just nod politely; they were genuinely interested in solving this problem with me. I eventually moved my entire lab into the space after some time, and the Resoloon team grew organically out of that shared passion, giving the project the depth it needed for the next level.
We brought together skills that are almost impossible to find in one room. Zsombor, a physics major with a deep well of knowledge in machine learning and mathematical modeling, joined us to tackle the invisible complexity; simulations, wind-prediction, and the computer vision pipeline. Then there were the electrical engineering majors: Zalán and Domonkos. Zalán, who once built a drone from scratch without using any libraries, is a whiz with PCB design and low-level firmware. Domonkos is our expert in high-level embedded systems; he built our gimbal system from the ground up and is now focusing on our API and camera control infrastructure.
For me (the founder responsible for the vision, the technology, and even the founder-level sales) Resoloon is everything. I spend around 60-80 hours a week on this mission. I’m thinking about dropping out of my electrical engineering degree, not because I don’t value education, but because the real-world lab we’ve created is too important to pause.
We started Resoloon because we couldn't stand the status quo. Now, thanks to a serendipitous community and a team of builders, we’re changing how the world gets its intelligence from the stratosphere.