Betaflight Blackbox Explorer

This tool allows you to open logs recorded by Betaflight's Blackbox feature in your web browser. You can seek through the log to examine graphed values at each timestep. If you have a flight video, you can load that in as well and it'll be played behind the log. You can export the graphs as a WebM video to share with others.

Installation

Current blackbox explorer version is built as PWA. Meaning it can work in both online and offline modes as regular desktop app would.

Latest stable version

For the latest stable released version visit https://blackbox.betaflight.com/

Unstable testing versions

The latest master build is always available at https://master.dev.blackbox.betaflight.com/

Be aware that these versions are intended for testing / feedback only, and may be buggy or broken. Caution is advised when using these versions.

Install the app to be used in offline mode

Follow the procedure to install PWA on your platform. For example on MacOS chrome:

Usage

Click the "Open log file/video" button at the top right and select your log file and your flight video (if you recorded one).

You can scroll through the log by clicking or dragging on the seek bar that appears underneath the main graph. The current time is represented by the vertical red bar in the center of the graph. You can also click and drag left and right on the graph area to scrub backwards and forwards.

Syncing your log to your flight video

The blackbox plays a short beep on the buzzer when arming, and this corresponds with the start of the logged data. You can sync your log against your flight video by pressing the "start log here" button when you hear the beep in the video. You can tune the alignment of the log manually by pressing the nudge left and nudge right buttons in the log sync section, or by editing the value in the "log sync" box. Positive values move the log toward the end of the video, negative values move it towards the beginning.

Customizing the graph display

Click the "Graph Setup" button on the right side of the display in order to choose which fields should be plotted on the graph. You may, for example, want to remove the default gyro plot and add separate gyro plots for each rotation axis. Or you may want to plot vbat against throttle to examine your battery's performance.

Developing

Node setup

We are using nvm to manage the correct node vesion, follow the install instructions there. After which from blackbox directory just run:

nvm use

Yarn

For dependency management we are using yarn, follow the instructions there to install it.

Development mode

We are using vite for development setup. It provides bundling and various optimisations like hot module reloading.

With node and yarn setup, to start developing run:

yarn start

This will start development server and the Blackbox will be available on http://localhost:5173/.

Installing development build locally

If you want to have latest and greatest version installed on your machine from the tip of the repository:

First need to build the application:

yarn build

Then start the application in preview mode

yarn preview

Visit http://localhost:4173/ and follow the steps from Install the app to be used in offline mode

Common problems

Flight video won't load, or jumpy flight video upon export

Some flight video formats aren't supported by Chrome, so the viewer can't open them. You can fix this by re-encoding your video using the free tool Handbrake. Open your original video using Handbrake. In the output settings, choose MP4 as the format, and H.264 as the video codec.

Because of Google Bug #66631, Chrome is unable to accurately seek within H.264 videos that use B-frames. This is mostly fine when viewing the flight video inside Blackbox Explorer. However, if you use the "export video" feature, this bug will cause the flight video in the background of the exported video to occasionally jump backwards in time for a couple of frames, causing a very glitchy appearance.

To fix that issue, you need to tell Handbrake to render every frame as an intraframe, which will avoid any problematic B-frames. Do that by adding "keyint=1" into the Additional Options box:

Hit start to begin re-encoding your video. Once it finishes, you should be able to load the new video into the Blackbox Explorer.

License

This project is licensed under GPLv3.