The Airbot OpenLager gives the capability of black box recording to any drone that doesn't have it. This is fantastic for tuning and finding issues in your system.
This device needs to be flashed with updated firmware before use. Follow the simple instructions in the wiring & info tab.
Check out our other flight controller accessories, as well as the rest of our Airbot selection!
Features
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It's faster than an average black box with a 4 bit SD interface clocked at 19.2MHz with DMA.
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It has buffer memory to ride out times when the SD card is busy (125kbytes with the current firmware)
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It fits in a smaller form factor builds with ease.
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ESD protection on input pins.
- And it has a flip-up microSD connector that is better at retaining the card in crashes and hard landings.
Specifications
- Dimensions: 20x15mm
- Weight: 2g
Includes
- 1x Airbot OpenLager Blackbox
Wiring & Info
The OpenLager is easy to use with async serial. First, wire according to the diagram below (an example of an OpenPilot-style connector is in the drawing). Note that you should attach the flight board's TX to Openlager's RX pin!
OpenLager has an onboard regulator and can be powered with 3.3-5.5V (the regulator dropout voltage is low enough that the SD card will still work properly at 3.3V input).
SD CARD MUST BE FAT16 OR FAT32 FORMAT. FIRMWARE MUST BE UPDATED BEFORE USING:
- Format your SD card. It must be either FAT or FAT32 format (SanDisk Extreme Pro 8GB recommended)
- Put the firmware lager.bin file into the sdcard and insert into the OpenLager
- Power on. The RED led should blink for several seconds. Wait until the RED led is stops blinking and continue to wait 10s more.
- Power off
- Format the SD card again
- Insert the SD card into OpenLager and power on.
- Power off; remove the card, and attach it to your computer. You'll find openLager has written a file to it called lager.cfg:
{
"startupMorse" : "",
"useSPI" : false,
"baudRate" : 2000000,
"preallocBytes" : 104857600,
"preallocGrow" : false
}
The important field to change is baudRate -- set it to the speed of the serial you'll be using for logging. dRonin supports 115200, 250000, 1500000, 2000000, and 2470000 bits per second. Cleanflight prefers 250000 bits per second, etc.
The green LED is on always when power is applied, and the red LED blinks with activity when the card is writing. After 200ms of inactivity, the buffers on openLager will be forcibly flushed. If power is suddenly removed, the file may not be completed in the filesystem; this can be changed by setting preallocGrow to 'true' at the possible cost of garbage being present at the end of the file in this scenario.
The firmware for openlager may be updated by putting an appropriate firmware image called lager.bin on the card.
