I’m wondering how to get access to the post-flight mission after creating an auto-pilot mission in QGroundControl and deploying the boat. While I can re-open the mission that I programmed in QGroundControl, there were a few times when our BlueBoat didn’t quite make it on the set mission path, and I want to use its speed and relative location to determine the connection between the BlueBoat mission and our affixed water quality sensors.
Thanks in advance from someone who is still really new to using the BlueBoat for research.
There are some different ways to do this, depending on what you need.
The autopilot stores binary “DataFlash” logs (.bin files) of everything it’s aware of and trying to do during a dive (think like an aeroplane black-box), which you can access through the BlueOS Log Browser. If you click the green play button on a log it will open up a log investigation tool that can visualise the path for you, as well as data from the various log messages the autopilot records.
QGroundControl also records the MAVLink messages from the autopilot in telemetry logs (.tlog files), which can be replayed within QGC, uploaded for exploration into the web-hosted version of the log-viewing tool built into BlueOS (or the beta version, for the latest experimental features), or explored / have data extracted using one of the other available tools. Note that both QGC and Log Viewer have some basic data export options as well.
Have a try of those options, then feel free to follow up if you get stuck on subsequent steps
If you’re doing research you may want to delve into QGIS, but if you have specific needs that you think others could benefit from too they could potentially be integrated into Cockpit, or some other tool as seems relevant (possibly a BlueOS Extension?). Always open to discussing the interesting things people are trying to do, and whether/how they can be streamlined
Thank you, @EliotBR , that was really helpful, and I was able to get the logs into the UAV viewer, get the GPS data, and get that into ArcGIS. I’m wondering about the naming of log files, though, as I’ve noticed that the dates for log files are not consistent with the dates in which we had the BlueBoat operational. For instance, we have four log files with dates 2025-12-09 and upon uploading each to the UAV viewer, I notice that one of these was from a trip on 2025-12-10. Is this something I need to adjust in settings somewhere or is this a known problem?
Hi @aaron.ridall -
The logs timestamp is dependent on what time BlueOS running on the Pi thinks it is. If it does not have an internet connection, it only will get time when a browser opens the BlueOS page, at which time it syncs with the client computer’s clock. Maybe on the weirdly dated files this never happened during operations, using solely your GCS software? We do plan to make the GPS time provide BlueOS with this information moving forward…
Great! I’m glad I could help
I’ve also suggested internally that we likely want some kind of guide with that information (and probably some other information access / usage approaches), since our current resources are effectively hands off once the vehicle is up and running.
It’s possible one is using UTC, and the other is displaying times in your local timezone? Not something I’ve looked into, but you should be able to see whether they’re consistently different by your timezone offset.
I believe this is the relevant GitHub issue, but it only partly applies here. The BlueBoat will indeed update its BlueOS clock time when the control station software connects (assuming MAVLink time syncing is enabled, and the provided time is more than I think 5 minutes newer than its current time), but it will also already be updating when it gets GPS signal (if GPS time syncing is enabled via the same parameter, which it should be by default), which likely often happens before QGroundControl connects.
I suppose there’s some possibility one of the ArduPilot logs got started before that (e.g. if LOG_DISARMED is enabled), in which case maybe the filename was using outdated time from the last time it was turned on. I haven’t looked into what happens in such cases…
