trying to understand the .BIN format.

[Jinah Adam]

is there any documentation for the .bin format? I'm trying to read it , to do some analysis across flights. i understand its a binary file. is it similar to tlogs? 

thanks.

[Kevin Hester]

Hi,

I replied to Jinah directly - but I'll copy and paste here so that it shows up for future archive searchers (also the python reader in mavutils is a good reference):

Alas - I don't think there is an actual doc.  However, the format is pretty simple:

a binary header

then a series of messages

initially your reader only needs to understand one message type (FMT)

the emitted log will include a series of FMT messages at the beginning to define all the message types it will be emitting

The format of the binary file is in the same sequence as the text .log file format.  I ended up writing my parser by referring to the APM source.  Here it is in case it is useful to you: https://github.com/geeksville/arduleader/blob/master/common/src/main/scala/com/geeksville/dataflash/DFReader.scala

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 12:13 AM, Jinah Adam <jina...@gmail.com> wrote:

is there any documentation for the .bin format? I'm trying to read it , to do some analysis across flights. i understand its a binary file. is it similar to tlogs? 

thanks.

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[Brian DeBusk]

Why not just parse the text log?  It has everything the binary file does I believe, and it can easily be parsed (especially with Python -- literally just a few lines of code).

Brian

[Kevin Hester]

They are both relatively similar.  But if you can parse the bin file you don't ever need to convert to a .log  I think Jinah was asking because he wants to add bin support to exmaps.

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[Jonathan Challinger]

I think the primary benefit of the binary logs is that they're much more compact. You can transfer them and parse them faster.

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 8:52 AM, Brian DeBusk <brianc...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Jonathan Challinger]

Jinah, for a reference implementation take a look at pymavlink's DFReader.py