Mavlink hello world

[Matthew Twomey]

Hey all - I'm struggling a bit getting going with sending direct mavlink messages to a Pixhawk.

At this point all I'm trying to achieve is sending a direct mavlink message from a Raspberry Pi to a Pixhawk. I'm able to engage mavproxy on the Pi and arm a Pixhawk through this interface and I'm trying to repeat this behavior using a dedicate Python program (e.g. non-interactive). I'm really at the testing stage right now.

I understand the the protocol itself is spec'd out in XML and I was able to generate the Python headers with mavgen (I successfully created mavlinkv10.py), however I'm very unclear on how to use this. 

Serial connectivity aside, can someone assist a bit with the high level concept of how this should be done?

[Daniel Agar]

Hi Matthew,

Have you seen this? http://qgroundcontrol.org/mavlink/pymavlink

You can generate the python bindings yourself from the mavlink repo, or look at pymavlink. https://github.com/ArduPilot/pymavlink

This is the common message definitions you'll want to use with a pixhawk running with PX4 or ArduPilot. http://mavlink.org/messages/common