dwiel / pymavlink

python MAVLink interface and utilities

Pymavlink

This is a python implementation of the MAVLink protocol. It includes a source code generator (generator/mavgen.py) to create MAVLink protocol implementations for other programming languages as well. Also contains tools for analizing flight logs.

Documentation

Please see http://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/mavlink-commands.html for documentation.

For realtime discussion please see the pymavlink gitter channel here https://gitter.im/ArduPilot/pymavlink

Installation

Pymavlink supports both python2 and python3.

The following instructions assume you are using Python 2 and a Debian-based (like Ubuntu) installation.

Dependencies

Pymavlink has several dependencies :

- future : for python 2 and python 3 interoperability (http://python-future.org/)
- lxml : for checking and parsing xml file (http://lxml.de/installation.html)
- python-dev : for mavnative
- a C compiler : for mavnative

Optional :

- numpy : for FFT
- pytest : for tests

On linux

lxml has some additional dependencies that can be installed with your package manager (here with apt-get) :

sudo apt-get install gcc python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev

Optional for FFT scripts and tests:

sudo apt-get install python-numpy python-pytest

Using pip you can install the required dependencies for pymavlink :

sudo pip2 install -U future lxml

The -U parameter allows updating future and lxml version if it is already installed.

On Windows

Use pip to install future as for linux. Lxml can be installed with a windows installer from here : https://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml/3.6.0

Installation

For users

It is recommended to install pymavlink from PyPi with pip, that way dependencies should be auto install by pip.

sudo pip2 install -U pymavlink

The -U parameter allow to update pymavlink version if it is already installed.

Mavnative

By default, pymavlink will try to compile and install mavnative which is a C extension for parsing mavlink. Mavnative only supports mavlink1. To skip mavnative installation and reduce dependencies like gcc and python-dev, you can pass DISABLE_MAVNATIVE=True environment variable to the installation command:

sudo DISABLE_MAVNATIVE=True pip2 install -U pymavlink

For developers

On the pymavlink directory, you can use :

sudo MDEF=PATH_TO_message_definitions pip2 install . -v

The -v parameter will output the installation commands on the terminal. The MDEF usage is require as pip install is done from /tmp directory, so it is necessary to use MDEF variable to point on the message_definitions directory. Use pip should auto install dependencies and allow to keep them up-to-date with pip.

Or:

sudo python2 setup.py install

Advanced usage

Please see Pip documentation : https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/

License

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pymavlink is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3 or later.

The source code generated by generator/mavgen.py is available under the permissive MIT License.