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 mavlink command reference.
For realtime discussion please see the pymavlink gitter channel
Examples can be found in the repository or in the ArduSub book
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](http://python-future.org/) : for python 2 and python 3 interoperability
- [lxml](http://lxml.de/installation.html) : for checking and parsing xml file
- 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
From the pymavlink directory, you can use :
sudo MDEF=PATH_TO_message_definitions pip2 install . -v
Since pip installation is executed from /tmp, it is necessary to point to the directory containing message definitions with MDEF. MDEF should not be set to any particular message version directory but the parent folder instead. If you have cloned from mavlink/mavlink then this is /mavlink/message_definitions . Using pip should auto install dependencies and allow you to keep them up-to-date.
Or:
sudo python2 setup.py install
License
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.