Need something to spend time on when the weather is bad?Sombody claimed you trespassed their property and you wanna show them the facts?
Wondering how your bird is doing or what happened when you lost control over it?

In the world of Aviation they have a couple orange boxes they call Black Boxes to evaluate a whole bunch of stuff after accidents.
One of these boxes records data from a bunch of various sensors placed all over the craft.

In our expanding little Drone World we are also getting boxes and logs like these and they are pretty cool!

Starting with a black black box called Flytrex because that is the one I'm used to and the P3 logs as that's what we're all here for
(I'll have a go at healtydrones.org later and if you have other places please reply with links and comments)

How to upload your files.
If you're flying older models like the P1 or P2 you need the box and it uploands automaticly via SIM card like you have in your phone.
Your Phantom 3 stores the logs in a folder on your cell, pad or whatever youre using to run your DJI Go app so you don't need The Box.
Plug your device into a PC and browse to (in my case Samsung Galaxy Note 4 running updated Android) via USB

Go to your Flytrex profile and click Upload Mission right under your name to browse for the logs.


In my case the address is Datamaskin\Jonny Nedregård (Galaxy Note4)\Phone\DJI\dji.pilot\FlightRecord and it looks like this
(If you cant find it reply with you device name and operating system. Then I'm sure someone can help.)

NOTE: You might wanna copy the whole FlightRecord folder onto your computer if you're uploading multiple missions!
This will keep you from messing something up and you can move or delete each log after uploading.


Now you can allready start having some fun with your data, or just hit Publish if youre in a hurry and enter details later.
I do recommend you create and name a new aircraft if you allready have some logs from another bird before uploading though.

If you wanna spend some time to make it Great this is a good place to start!

You should write something about the flight!
No need to overdo it but it helps later when youre looking for something.

If you allready published a video from the flight on youtube or vimeo paste the address here.

If you publish a video later you can edit it in.

The next one might be important!
Here you can select public for all to see or private if you wanna keep it for yourself.


Another important one!
In this part you connect the flight to it's aircraft.
My P2 data is from 2 different Phantoms and I have no clue which data belongs to which quad.
Failing here also renders a lot of data like total flight time and distances useless.
Be sure to hit the pencil if you're uploading from a new craft!


Hitting the pencil brings you to this place.
It's also a shortcut to some of your current statistics and info.
Click on the Create New Aircraft and follow instructions.
(Too much to cover now, maybe next time)


If its a really cool mission cou can check the FB box to please your drone friends


Now push the Publish button!
I wish they moved it down to the bottom...
Anyway, as this was just a demo without value I'll smack the Cancel button.


Depending on how much time and effort you spent on the upload page you get a front with
an overview map, general flight statistics, your story and the resulting video neatly presented.


Click the little arrow by the flag to delete (I stopped doing that), edit or export the flight data for use in things like Google Earth.
And you can hide the mission by setting it to Private rather than delete and loose data.

Google earth is great fun!
The green line is your flight path in 3d and the grey line is the shadow on the ground.


Finally you can click the Big Blue Bar to dive deeper and Geek around with your data


Move the cursor over the bars to get data from specific points (Watch the red dot on the map)


Thats it, thanks for watching and remember: No questions or ideas are stupid!

Click here to play with these data.

Most of this is available in the "GO' program. Thanks for sharing your info, it is a bit more detailed. Healthy Drones seems to be the most popular with the forum users. The info in the DJI "GO" program is enough to keep you out of trouble.

Having a go at https://healthydrones.com/ as I want to learn more about these modern tools.

I'll edit the ride in here so it stays with the Flytrex Tutorial.
--------------------------------
First you have to register and log in.
Then you have to upload your logs on the UPLOAD page.


When thats done hit the MY LOGS link to get started.
The fun allready takes off as youre given titles and whatnot
in addition to a whole bunch of interesting statistics.


The first one I noticed was of course the battery temp meter.
As you can see in the post above, FLYTREX doesent seem to be able to read temp data.
On the surface my batteries seems to have had an awesome time.


There's a link to the hottest flight so lets click it.


You can select any fligt by clicking the links to the left.
I'm going to click my last flight to dig a little deeper.
Again: Flytrex doesent display these data. I'll email them about that.
Here I can see that the temperature starts a little below what I like them
to be but still no problem as it's 10c above DJI's limit of 0c.
Everything still looks perfect, 21 charges, 100% battery life.
It tells me when it's made and here's one for the paranoid folks: Your Serial Number.


Clicking on the Battery Cells tabs displays useful info and something screams out in red.
This one requires further study...look at the battery's previous flights and so on..

Let's gif all of the battery's 21 flights to learn more about it.
Now a couple of trends shows up. Cell 1 and 4 does not look too good.
Most of the bad readings are recorded early, but not all of them.  I'll gif the other battery's last 21 flights to compare.
(The .gif is linked from my own server and may take a sec to load)

The other battery tells a different story when gif'ed.The All Good is all over the place, and the red's are rare but still present.


Ok over to to the Efficiency tab and everything looks bright and sunny again.


Now that the POWER tab is explored I'll move up to the General tab.
Lots of beautiful data displayed aroud Google Maps with the flight path.
Export flight data to csv and kml is great!
Lets you play with the flight data in other cool places.


The notification tab also have info I cant remember seeing in the Flytrex system.
These guys seems to like kml files and thats awesome!

The two last lines are the hard ones.
Gotta sleep now but I'll be back for more knowledge

The Large Map tab is just that, a Large Map.O and the .kml's.



The Photos tab tries to display some data about Poto/Video but failed in this case.


Clicking on the previous flight real quick reveals another cool map and some info.


Ok moving on to the Sensors tab.
Fine looking signal map. Houweever there are (In this case) 43 Minor Signal Errors marked in green.
No use clicking on anything but there's a KML below the map...


The kml shows recorded path in 3D when you open it in Google Earth.
If the drone flew along this trajectory for half a battery it's gone.
No further info about the 43 minor signal errors though.


Lets have a look at a little more tricky flight to spice it up and mabybe learn something.
For example, the weak spots are not at all where I'd expect them to be.




The kml can be used to stuff like confirming line of sight in glorious 3D


Gotta go now, Merry Christmas!

Signal Score is the next tab (We're back on the Final Flight)


On to the GPS tab.
Here it looks like it dropped a few sattelites on takeoff and quickly picked them back up.
One more kml to play with as well.


Last tab under SENSORS is the GPS tab.


In the CONTROLS section there are only two tabs.
It said
Not enough data to display reliable results.
Please try uploading a longer flight


so I'll borrow data from the complicated flight again.
The Rudder Response tab shows that the drone turned slightly faster to the left.


Rudder Map on the other tab has some scary colors on some of the readings.
You can click the links to display each reading on the map.
No fancy .kml to play with.


The final category WIND also asked for a bigger log so we'll stay with my Garden Flight.
It displays something almost magical!
If this is correct you can spend a battery on getting
wind data from the area before you start recording your video!


Finally the last tab in the last category is also the last beautiful GooGle MaP!
Again you can click the links to display the .... calculations?... on the map.


Wow!
This  tool is awesome!
More fun to be had for sure, if ony one knows about more sites like this please gimme link!

[RCG]Balthazar Posted at 2015-12-20 11:22
Really? Cool!
Great news man I'll have to look at this thanks
Do you have a link to your Go page ...

The "GO" program is the "DJI Go" program. Hi the Icon in the extreme upper left hand corner and have an internet connection. All of your flights will be displayed by date.

Having another go at the GO app.I dont have a drone supported by the go app, but this is about logs so I guess it's ok.


TiP#1
There are no way I'm gonna fiddle with the phone for houers.
So I will start this part with installing a PC<->hone<-Pad program to bring the GO app over to my projector.
In this case the app is called Samsung SideSync and supports a bunch of....Samsungs I guess.
There are apps like this for your phone too (I hope) so check it out it's Awesome.


Ok.
For the very first time I'll click rather than Tap/Squeeeeze the Go icon.


Then I'll head straight to the Paper Plane and fly in to the logs.
I noticed it's on me for a P3S update even though I never had a P3S.


The little plane flipped the screen for me! Thanks fella!
Up comes the last few flight logs along with some statistics from my P3P.
The little clouds means the logs have been upoladed to a DJI server.
What's up with the Map Loading?


Clicking the final flight brings up Map Loading...whats up with that...and then google maps and some data.
A picture of my P3P with my nick. Again with the Map Loading.
City name and flight date DJI move it a little this ---> wany and add time perhaps?
Flight Total Time, Travel Distance and Max Height starts feeding the Stats Hunger.
Then follows a bar seemingly telling me I can fly on for half the battery.
Some more stats:
Lenght, Distance(?), Horizontal Speed in Meters per Second, Vertical Speed in Meters per Second, Remaining battery (?), Mode, Compass and Map Type.



You can click away all of that and zoom in a little for a closer look at the final item: The Flight Path.


New click anywhere on the map brings the Flight Record player back up.

Under the map there's a set of controls:

Center Map, Toggle sticks (Nice!) Play, Playback Speed and Share Screenshot.

Having a map there is kind of messy when you're trying to analyze the data.
So I moved the map into the sea and went Full Screen (second icon from the right above the player)
The Critically low voltage warning only displayed once!
To get a screenshot of it I had to go back to the log list and start over.
The controls show the level of panic you get when the drone tells you it will land in a forest.
I'm a cool 20%ish from Totally Spooked. Must have been due to the drone telling me I still have 51% battery...


That's it folks!
For now anyways
The 3 systems Flytrex, Healtydrones and the Go Flight Record player makes a nice collection.
You have another cool tool?
Gimme Gimme Link!
Pretty Please with sugar on top!
Because this is fun and I still haven't got all the answers!

Sorry about my short BS Fuse but please tell me how to connect other drones or import/export their flight data so I can get started.
If not, lets delete our replies.
There's enough fights going on in the forums already so lets not start another one.

Is there a way to pull logs off the drone itself?  I have a P3S and my one and only time flying with an iPad (for the larger screen) I lost connection with the drone after 250 ft of flight distance, 3 story buildings in the way.  The logs indicate a 90 second flight and just the 250 distance and altitude of 95 ft.  I had to go to the drone with the controller, left the iPad at the home station, and continued my flight walking under it and keeping it close until the battery was at 30%.  Landed and when I checked the flight logs later I found the truncated data.  I flew for about 18 min, a distance of about 4,000 ft from my mapping on Google Maps but can't be for sure.  I have connected the drone to the PC but no drivers and can't communicate directly.  I synced the data and only use my Android phone now, the iPad video was too laggy and blocky, but on the DJI cloud is the same info on the iPad and now on my phone.  Just checking as I am sure there are those who fly without smart devices attached to capture logs, right?  Thanks in advance.

JyBravo70 Posted at 2016-1-4 09:38
Is there a way to pull logs off the drone itself?  I have a P3S and my one and only time flying with ...

Yes there are some .DAT files on a SD card inside the drone. It should show up as a external drive but I have no clue how to analyze them and cant check as I've lost my bird.
Flytrex and healtydrones only accepts the .txt logs from your app.

[RCG]Balthazar Posted at 2016-1-5 01:26
Yes there are some .DAT files on a SD card inside the drone. It should show up as a external drive ...

I checked and found the folders with some files, 3 or 4, but they are all encoded to a format I can't open.  For maintenance and repair functions I am sure there is a record somewhere as people could simply format their SD cards and send drones in.  That would erase all performance data, error codes, etc. so I am sure there is a backup someplace.  I was just wanting to confirm flight time and distance for the time the drone and ipad lost contact.  

As a photographer I am used to formatting my cards after each shoot.  I am sure some of these log and DAT files can get HUGE over time.  I already know I have to get some larger cards, 32G, just don't know now if I should format them after each recording session or not.  At least the logs captured by the mobile app are uploaded to the cloud for review later, and across devices.

See if there's a hidden folder
I dont think you need to format anything, the drone probably overwrites the oldest file when the card gets full.
I'd keep a copy of all the files you I could find though on my my computer though.

JyBravo70 Posted at 2016-1-5 10:53
I checked and found the folders with some files, 3 or 4, but they are all encoded to a format I ca ...

So how did it go?

Here's a couple more places to explore:

http://www.flylog.info/

https://www.mapsmadeeasy.com/log_viewer


http://www.djilogs.com/

Found another promising tool for the .DAT files

https://www.exmaps.com/

Screenshots from a .DAT file found in the forums: