README_original.md

Libmav Telemetry Python

Introduction

This is a simple Python script that leverages libmav Python to fetch telemetry from the Autopilot. The advantages of libmav are its simplicity and low-size while providing full interaction through raw mavlink messages.

The directory ./services/telemetry contains mavlink dialect files in the XML format that are required by libmav. The folder structure of this example docker service is as follows:

services/telemetry/
├── Dockerfile
├── libmav_telemetry.py
└── mavlink
    ├── common.xml
    ├── minimal.xml
    └── standard.xml

It would just as well be possible to include mavlink directly as a git submodule.

This example is using an official Python Docker base image based on alpine ( currently python:3.11.6-alpine3.18) due to its incredibly low size of less than 20 MB, which results in equally small AuterionOS applications. If instead a Debain system is required for more flexibility, consider using the official "slim" Docker images from Python, such as python:3.11-slim-bullseye. These are two to three times larger than the Alpine images, but still an order of magnitude smaller than the regular full size images such as python:3.12 for example.

Commands

Package and deploy

This is an application for AuterionOS. Build and install it with auterion-cli

Build

auterion-cli app build

It will create an app artifact in build/libmav-telemetry-python.auterionos.

After a successful build, you can connect your board via ethernet and run the following command to install the application on your device:

auterion-cli app install `build/libmav-telemetry-python.auterionos`

The application execution can be monitored by running the following command:

auterion-cli app logs libmav-telemetry-python -f

You can stop and remove the application with the following commands:

auterion-cli app remove libmav-telemetry-python