mscl-rs 0.1.0

Parser for MicroStrain Communication Library (MSCL) packets in Rust.

mscl-rs

Rust parser for data from the 3DM®-CX5-15 IMU. This library provides python bindings in a convenient format so that the client side (Python) does not need to spend precious processing time parsing the data.

This library has been benchmarked to be ~10x faster than the official Python python-mscl equivalent (which has a C++ backend).

This library is not intended to be a full replacement for the C++ MSCL library but rather a lightweight parser for the data packets, and intended to be more well maintained and Python free threading compatible.

Features will be added as needed, open an issue or PR if you need something!

Installation

This package is available on PyPI, you can install it via pip:

pip install mscl-rs

Wheels are available for Linux (x86_64 and aarch64) 3.13, 3.14, and 3.14t. Any other platform or python version will require building from source, which your package manager (e.g. pip) will automatically handle, but you still need to install Rust.

Public API

The main entrypoint is the SerialParser class, which can be used to read data from the IMU over a serial connection. E.g.

from mscl_rs import SerialParser

parser = SerialParser(port="/dev/ttyUSB0", timeout=1.0)  # Timeout of 1 second
parser.start()  # Starts a background thread to collect data

try:
    while True:
        packets = parser.get_data_packets(block=True)  # Block until data is available
        for packet in packets:
            print(packet)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    pass
finally:
    parser.stop()

To see all available methods, documentation, and the data packet structure, see the mscl_rs.pyi file.

Local Development Setup:

You will need uv, and Rust installed.

Then clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/NCSU-High-Powered-Rocketry-Club/mscl_rs.git && cd mscl-rs

If you have plugged in your IMU via USB, you can test the example parser script by the command below. Make sure to change the serial port in examples/parse_mscl_rs.py if needed.

uv run examples/parse_mscl_rs.py

This will automatically build the Rust code and install the package in a virtual environment, and automatically run the example script.

You do not need to separately run maturin develop at all.

To switch between development and release builds, you can change the config-settings in pyproject.toml.

Testing

This library has tests both in the Rust and Python layers. To run the tests, run the following commands:

# Run Rust tests
cargo test
# Run Python tests
uv run pytest tests/

If you have an actual IMU connected via serial, this will also run tests that parse real data from the IMU, and benchmark the performance against the official python-mscl library.

Cross compiling and releasing

To build wheels for all platforms, you can use maturin's and Zig's cross compiling support. If you are on linux, you can run the compile.sh script to build wheels for the platforms and python versions we provide first class support for.

chmod +x compile.sh
./compile.sh

This will create wheels in the target/wheels/ folder.

We can now publish to PyPI using uv:

uv publish target/wheels/*

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.