pic: Behold The Black Box

[PhilBot]

Hi

I was attracted to this thread by it's title, but now I'm confused...

A "Black-Box" is a datalogger, used to record what happens during flight (for later analysis), but what you are describing seems more of a serial I/O device... ie: there is no mention of data storage capacity.

Is the purpose of this board to expand the RC's I/O capability, or is it truly an event logger.

I needed a data logger this year, so I used a serial flash board from SparkFun to do the job simply. Here is the white paper: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2065

[lukevanoort]

Originally Posted by PhilBot

A "Black-Box" is a datalogger, used to record what happens during flight (for later analysis), but what you are describing seems more of a serial I/O device... ie: there is no mention of data storage capacity.

"Black box" is also a term for something that you don't need to know the inner workings of, just the interfaces. The classic example of this meaning of "black box" is a car - the average person doesn't know how it works, but they know how to use the interfaces (shifter, gas pedal (more correctly termed the air pedal though...), brake pedal, etc.) to achieve a desired result. This board takes a whole bunch of sensor inputs and presents the result of the signal processing to the RC in a nice series of packets without requiring that the RC programmer to know how it gets the data from the sensor, the data just comes in the serial port.

[PhilBot]

Originally Posted by lukevanoort

"Black box" is also a term for something that you don't need to know the inner workings of, just the interfaces.

OK, I get that... ie: the company called "Black Box" that makes a million different I/O devices.

But.... the original poster said:

its called the Black Box after the black box found in airplanes

So I wondered if it really WAS a data recorder "like in an airplane".

Phil.

[ham90mack]

It looks like a sensor relay that expands the number of sensor inputs to the RC to me...