Blackbox Video Exporter
A program that turns a Betaflight blackbox file into a video file. Talking about how I solved the timeless Stick Cam problem, and how you can too! 2020-10-08
The Problem
Ever since I got interested in FPV drones, I loved watching freestyle videos on the internet. However, it was really hard to know what the pilot was doing with the sticks, and I had no idea how most tricks were performed. There have been solutions to this problem, like sticking a GoPro to record a video of your transmitter, or using some editing magic to overlay the sticks using the Betaflight Blackbox Explorer:
However, this approach has a few problems:
- It doesn't look that good and is not customizale
- It takes up alot of space in the video
- It doesn't show enough information about the drone
How I Solved it
Solving this problem was pretty easy. I found a way to take a BFL file from the drone itself, and export it to a CSV file, which is way easier to work with. Just click here to see the file for yourself! It looks a bit like this, at over 350 000 lines long:
The program I made can then take this file, and generate a video file from it. It contains a lot of information, like the stick positions, the voltage, the power used, the current orientation... The video it exports is thin but tall, which means that it can easily be added on the sides of the Gopro footage. Here is a demo showing what video it can produce:
How You Can Try it
If you would like to try this program for yourself, you can click here. The interface isn't that great, so feel free to read the README.md on this project's GitHub to get more information about the way to use it.
Conclusion
Once I will have built my 5 inch drone, I will certainly use this software if I ever upload freestyle footage. It will allow people to see a bunch of information, like the position of the sticks and the orientation of the drone. This program only took a few days to program, and I can't wait to try it on a real racing drone!