Review: OpenLog, a simple logging device

Updated: January 21, 2022

I bought a small module built around ATMega328p. It is a serial port logger device with an SD card slot. Here is why you need it, why it is useful, and how you use it. The official documentation, OpenLog Hookup Guide, was written by a developer — probably the author of the code — not a technical writer. The documentation is confusing — sometimes conflicting —, includes friendly expressions, which are not friendly at all to non-native English speakers, and lacks critical information such as absolute maximum ratings. Here is my interpretation and the findings in my test.

The problem

Last year, I wrote a firmware for ESP8266 and ESP32. The firmware — roomPing — is a sensor that periodically reads RSSI, or signal strength, and sends ICMP echo requests to destinations. The device then sends the results to a MQTT broker. Another MQTT client reads the values, transform them, and sends the data to influxdb. That way, I can monitor signal strength and network health in multiple rooms. Several devices have been deployed, and I was happy with the visualization.

The problem is, the firmware reboots every day or two. Sometime the uptime is more than three days, but no more than a week. The firmware probably crashes, and reboots. From the practical point of view, it does not really matter. The interval is 5 minutes, and missing few data points do not affect the result. However, I am not happy with the bug. It should be resolved. All I need is a crash log. One way to do it is, obviously, connecting a computer, and to log all the logs. But I wanted a simpler — and cheaper — solution. This is what OpenLog is designed for; logging characters from serial port, and save them on SD card.

When managing physical servers, I built a network dedicated for serial console. Some consoles were implemented with IPMI, and others were plain old serial console. They were tremendously useful when you need console access, i.e. upgrading operation system, changing BIOS settings, and debugging. However, for two dozens of small IoT devices, it is not very practical. Besides, I also have many ARM System-on-a-Chip servers, too. I would like to record all the serial console log, too. A central, remote serial console server is the best solution, but that would be very expensive. While you cannot interact with the console, logging would be useful for debug.

Overview

OpenLog is a small and cheap logger, is able to log outputs from other devices over serial, and saves the logs on SD card. The device is quite useful when you debug bugs on long-running devices, collect data from other devices, and monitor small System-on-a-Chip boards. It does not perform very well when baud rate is fast, but covers most of use cases.

OpenLog was designed and open-sourced by sparkfun. The code is available on the official GitHub repository. The price at sparkfun is USD 15.50 (as of 2022-01). My favorite AliExpress seller sells a copy of it at USD 2.17 excluding shipping fee.

The board has a microcontroller, ATMega328p, an SD card slot, breakout headers, and a few passive components.

The ATMega328p runs at 3.3V even when you supply 5V (or more), the onboard 3.3V regulator drops the VCC to 3.3V.

The official documentation says OpenLog supports 64MB to 32GB while the datasheet page in the Wiki says the maximum is 16GB. The page also says they tested 64GB SD card. It’s up to you to believe which. My SD card used in the test is 32GB. Make sure the SD card is formatted in FAT16 or FAT32.

Although the official documentation does not mention it, the maximum voltage on RXI pin is 6V according to the wiki page on GitHub repository. You can monitor 3.3V and 5V devices with OpenLog.

The input buffer of ATMega328p is small. Writing data on SD card takes time. If the monitored device outputs many logs, or the baud rate is fast, OpenLog cannot catch up with it. If you need more performance, use other loggers.

All in all, OpenLog covers most of my use cases with the cheap price tag.

Usage

In the following sections, I will describe the possibly simplest usage, hooking up OpenLog and a device &mdhash; the monitored device —, configure OpenLog, and logging serial outputs from the monitored device.

Materials

What you need are:

• a device you want to record logs from
• a breadboard and a few jumper wires
• an SD card reader
• a micro SD card (64MB - 32GB, FAT16 or FAT32, no NTFS)

Hooking up

You need to connect at least two pins to the monitored device, RXI to TX pin of the monitored device, GND to the GND of the monitored device. VCC MAY be connected to 5V or 3.3V of the monitored device if you are fine with a few missing logs after power cycle.

The board has 10 breakout headers. The four on one side is used to upload OpenLog firmware to ATMega328p. Unless you would like to modify the firmware, or upload the latest firmware, you do not need to use them. Six on the other side are bit confusing. The official documentation mentions the headers, but did not explain what they are, other than simply calling them the FTDI header.

Configuring

If the baud rate of the monitored device is 9600, you do not need to configure anything. If not, keep reading.

OpenLog reads a configuration file, config.txt, from the SD card. It creates the file, if the file does not exist on the SD card. Simply power the both OpenLog and the monitored device. OpenLog creates the default configuration file even when the baud rate is wrong. Turn off the devices and put the SD card to your SD card reader. There should be config.txt.

Open config.txt and replace 9600 with the baud rate. The default baud rate of ESP8266 RTOS SDK is 74880, while esp-idf is 115200. Other common baud rates are:

• 9600 (default for old devices and arduino)
• 19200 for various Unix operating systems

As stated in the official documentation, the read buffer of OpenLog is small. Increasing baud rate increases possibility to miss some logs.

config.txt has other parameters you can modify, but — unless you have weird devices — the defaults should work fine.

Logging

Now config.txt has the correct baud rate, just simply insert the SD card to the SD card slot, and boot OpenLog and the monitored device. You should see one of the onboard LED flushing while OpenLog receives characters from the monitored device. Turn off the devices, and read the SD card. There should be LOGXXXXX.TXT, where XXXXX is the number of the log.

Some frameworks enable colors in logs by default. For example, ESP_LOGI — a macro of esp-idf to print texts — appends green color control sequences to the texts. If you would like to keep the code intact but to remove them, use:

sed -e 's/\x1B\[[0-9;]*[JKmsu]//g' LOGXXXXX.TXT

If you want to the log intact but make it eye-friendly, use less(1):

less -R LOGXXXXX.TXT

Also, AnsiEsc.vim vim plug-in highlights the colored text.

Further reading

The Wiki pages has more information than the official documentation. If you need to configure OpenLog over serial port, or to access to the console interface of OpenLog, the wiki pages and the source code are your friends. In most cases, you don’t.

Possible improvements

The code is written in arduino. You might be able to port the code to ESP8266 or ESP32 so that you can view the log over WiFi.

Adding 18650 battery shield to OpenLog. OpenLog sleeps when no data is available. It might be possible to run OpenLog on a battery a few days or a week.

Final words

I like OpenLog. It is cheap and small, easy to use, does one thing, and does it well. I bought five of them, and will place another order. You should have a few of them in your gadget bin, too.