Best way to log data from external sensors(for beginner)

Hello all,

I am in the process of building my first pixhawk rover. Eventually I would like to log data from sensors in a format that can show correlating gps coordinates. An example of a sensor would be a temperature sensor.
Because I have virtually no experience in programming and to my knowledge, to run the sensors through the pixhawk to be logged in mission planner would require serious programming, I am thinking of an alternative method. Before I make the purchases for the equipment I need, I wanted to hear what some of you think.
Here is the idea:
I am going to buy an arduino, as well as a clock module and an sd card module/shield, plus whatever sensors I want to use. I will then run this separately on my rover. Upon completion of a mission I will upload data from the arduino into excel for review. If I want to know where a sensor showed a particular figure, I will mark the time from excel, then cross reference that time to mission planner to find my gps coordinates.
In the mean time I figure this project will develop some basic coding skills as the arduino community has a good deal of tutorials for small projects like this and maybe in the future I will have a better understanding of how to do something like this through the pixhawk.

Any thoughts/opinions would be appreciated.

If it’s within your capabilities, hooking a GPS up to the arduino-system would provide both the GPS information and also a time-stamp in your Arduino-system data. This might eliminate the need for a clock module.

That is a great idea, thank you. I am at least going to attempt this, as I have seen several tutorials which attempt to show how to log gps coordinates on an arduino.