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.

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

Pymavlink supports both python2 and python3.

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

Pymavlink requires 3 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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.