My MicroSD shield quit on me! Alternative: SparkFun OpenLog

It's really frustrating when you buy a piece of hardware without thoroughly reading the feedback comments from different users. Well this was the case when I got myself a MicroSD shield from SparkFun. At first it worked very nice with the different libraries giving you quite an array of choices in terms of what you can do with the field. But the major drawback was that it took FIVE digital pins out the the Arduino to work namely:

MOSI - pin 11
MISO - pin 12
CLK - pin 13
CS - pin 4
ChipSelect - pin 8

- Pin 10 also needed to remain as an OUTPUT for the shield to remain operational. This was in direct conflict with servo controller board.

So it was quite clear that given the number of inputs (i.e servos, sensors etc...), this was going to cripple the development of the flight controller and perhaps prevent the continuation of this project. So a broken MicroSD shield forced me to look at alternative for a data logger and there came the OpenLog device, with simply connects to the Tx channel of the arduino and save any serial stream be passed. Brilliant!

Eventhough complex file manipulations and real-time searching of files can't be done with this device at least it frees the Flight controller for more devices to be 'plugged in' and expand its capabilities.

So without more to say, I'm getting myself one! Will post pictures as soon as I have it!

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