pymavlink

DEPRECATION WARNING

As of November 2020, this 'stable' implementation is deprecated. It is recommended to use the 'nextgen' implementation found in the ../javascript/ folder for new projects. This version has known issues with packet attribute conflicts (e.g., packet.id, packet.format) and incorrect packet packing.

Overview

This implementation generates npm modules for Node.js based on MAVLink XML manifests. It provides a MAVLink parser that emits events when valid messages are encountered. It is considered 'pre-beta' with a rough API.

The jspack and long packages located in generator/javascript/local_modules/ are locally modified copies of the original Node/npm packages. They have been tweaked to ensure compatibility with the requirements of this project.

When using these packages, be aware that their behavior may differ from the upstream npm versions. For original functionality and documentation, refer to the respective README.md files within the jspack and long folders.

TLOG files are a stream of MAVLink messages. Each message includes its complete header, checksum, and signature (if applicable).

Structure: Each MAVLink message is preceded by an 8-byte Unix timestamp representing the time in microseconds.

By default, jspack uses network (big-endian) byte order. You can specify a different byte order by using one of the following characters as the first character of your format string:

• <: little-endian
• >: big-endian
• !: network (big-endian) — this is the default if no other character is provided.

If the first character is not one of these, ! is assumed.

Since JavaScript does not natively support 64-bit integers, this library converts q and Q (int64/uint64) types into a 3-part array: [lowBits, highBits, unsignedFlag].

You can use these arrays with libraries like Long.js to perform calculations.

The recommended way to install pymavlink is via PyPI using pip. This method ensures that required dependencies are automatically installed.

Note: pymavlink supports Python 3. Python 2 support has been removed.

sudo python3 -m pip install --upgrade pymavlink

To use the jspack library in your Node.js project, install it using the npm package manager.

npm install jspack

After running the generator, you must manually copy the desired MAVLink protocol version into your project's node_modules folder and install its dependencies.

Example for mavlink_ardupilotmega_v1.0:

1. Copy the implementation to your project's node_modules.
2. Navigate to that directory and run npm install.

cp -R javascript/implementations/mavlink_ardupilotmega_v1.0 /path/to/my/project/node_modules/
cd /path/to/my/project/node_modules/mavlink_ardupilotmega_v1.0 && npm install

To build a UMD bundle to dist/long.js, use the following commands:

npm install
npm run build