BlackBox Date and Time Quick Tip

Alex -

Don’t you just hate it going through your blackbox logs and not really knowing which log is for which flight cause of the random date stamps… Well worry no more I have a quick tip that will help.

Get your blackbox logs from this..

To this..

Betaflight doesn’t know the time or date it doesn’t have a clock.
But Betaflight can correctly timestamp your blackbox logs IF it has an external clock source. This can be done in two different ways.

  1. Fit a GPS to your quad.
  2. From your Transmitter.

With the first method of fitting a GPS it works well for the bigger quads or quads with room. You just wait for the GPS to get a lock and start your blackbox log. The rest is automatic.

Most transmitters have a Real Time Clock and battery so that the transmitter can hold an accurate time. That time can be sent to your quad and then used to timestamp your logs.

Now for a couple of requirements.

  • Your going to need a OpenTX transmitter.
  • Running LUA scripts.
  • Betaflight v3.3+

Its the Betaflight LUA script that sends the date and time to the quad. You just need to set it up to run in the background on your TX and your good to go.

The How to

Just copy my screen shot from my RadioMaster TX16s and thats all you need.

For me its only a couple of clicks, your Tx maybe different.

  • Power on my Tx.
  • Hold the “SYS” button.
  • Scroll across the pages until you get to “Global Functions”.
  • Then create a new function as seen above.
    • GF1 ON Lua Script and then select bfbkgd.

If you do it as a Global Function it will work with all your quads.

This has been a feature in Betaflight for a long time its just one of those lesser know features. With this quick tip it could help your sort through your blackbox logs and just maybe make things a little easier.

Hope you found this useful happy blackboxing and fly safe everyone.