mavtools (mavencode / mavdecode)

Command line tools to encode / decode binary mavlink into a JSON format.

The tools are built on top of libmav, and are mostly used for debugging purposes.

Installation

mavencode and mavdecode are binaries without any dependencies.

You can download the binaries from the releases.

Or, do it with oneline:

curl -L https://github.com/Auterion/mavtools/releases/latest/download/mavtools-linux-gnu-x86_64.tar.gz | tar xz -C /tmp && sudo cp /tmp/install/bin/* /usr/local/bin

Usage

For a collection of useful uses, see mavtools one-liner tricks.

Decoding

mavdecode <binary mavlink capture file>

You can directly pipe that into jq for pretty-printing:

mavdecode <binary mavlink capture file> | jq

Input from stdin

This is useful to decode from a network stream (e.g. using netcat) or from a serial port.

cat <binary mavlink capture file> | mavdecode

Using your own message set

mavdecode comes with a built-in message set. You can however use your own message set by providing an xml file.

mavdecode --xml=<path to your xml> <binary mavlink capture file>

Decoded format

The decoded format is a stream of JSON objects, delimited by newlines.

Example:

{
  "id": 32,
  "name": "LOCAL_POSITION_NED",
  "system_id": 1,
  "component_id": 1,
  "seq": 0,
  "fields": {
    "time_boot_ms": 2714311,
    "vx": 20.1446,
    "vy": 23.6353,
    "vz": -0.0114382,
    "x": 12649,
    "y": 35699.4,
    "z": -7.52881
  }
}
{
  "id": 30,
  "name": "ATTITUDE",
  "system_id": 1,
  "component_id": 1,
  "seq": 0,
  "fields": {
    "pitch": 0.0056748,
    "pitchspeed": -0.00214324,
    "roll": -0.0038062,
    "rollspeed": 0.000281513,
    "time_boot_ms": 2714333,
    "yaw": 1.33996,
    "yawspeed": -0.000590359
  }
}

Encoding

You can also encode JSON objects into binary mavlink. The tool uses the same JSON format as the decode tool.

mavencode <json file>

Input from stdin

cat <json file> | mavencode

Using your own message set

mavencode comes with a built-in message set. You can however use your own message set by providing an xml file. mavencode can only encode messages that are in the provided xml file.

mavencode --xml=<path to your xml> <json file>

Directing output to a file

mavencode <json file> -o <output file>

The example.bin file is taken from the node-mavlink project

Consuming output from mavdecode

You can use the output of mavdecode as input to mavencode to round-trip the data.

cat <binary mavlink capture file> | mavdecode | mavencode