Skip to main content

Nanopb is a small code-size Protocol Buffers implementation in ansi C. It is especially suitable for use in microcontrollers, but fits any memory restricted system.

Project description

Nanopb - Protocol Buffers for Embedded Systems

Build Status

Nanopb is a small code-size Protocol Buffers implementation in ansi C. It is especially suitable for use in microcontrollers, but fits any memory restricted system.

Using the nanopb library

To use the nanopb library, you need to do two things:

  1. Compile your .proto files for nanopb, using protoc.
  2. Include pb_encode.c, pb_decode.c and pb_common.c in your project.

The easiest way to get started is to study the project in "examples/simple". It contains a Makefile, which should work directly under most Linux systems. However, for any other kind of build system, see the manual steps in README.txt in that folder.

Using the Protocol Buffers compiler (protoc)

The nanopb generator is implemented as a plugin for the Google's own protoc compiler. This has the advantage that there is no need to reimplement the basic parsing of .proto files. However, it does mean that you need the Google's protobuf library in order to run the generator.

If you have downloaded a binary package for nanopb (either Windows, Linux or Mac OS X version), the protoc binary is included in the 'generator-bin' folder. In this case, you are ready to go. Simply run this command:

generator-bin/protoc --nanopb_out=. myprotocol.proto

However, if you are using a git checkout or a plain source distribution, you need to provide your own version of protoc and the Google's protobuf library. On Linux, the necessary packages are protobuf-compiler and python-protobuf. On Windows, you can either build Google's protobuf library from source or use one of the binary distributions of it. In either case, if you use a separate protoc, you need to manually give the path to nanopb generator:

protoc --plugin=protoc-gen-nanopb=nanopb/generator/protoc-gen-nanopb ...

Running the tests

If you want to perform further development of the nanopb core, or to verify its functionality using your compiler and platform, you'll want to run the test suite. The build rules for the test suite are implemented using Scons, so you need to have that installed (ex: sudo apt install scons on Ubuntu). To run the tests:

cd tests
scons

This will show the progress of various test cases. If the output does not end in an error, the test cases were successful.

Note: Mac OS X by default aliases 'clang' as 'gcc', while not actually supporting the same command line options as gcc does. To run tests on Mac OS X, use: "scons CC=clang CXX=clang". Same way can be used to run tests with different compilers on any platform.

Project details


Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

nanopb-0.3.9.7.tar.gz (37.8 kB view hashes)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

nanopb-0.3.9.7-py2.py3-none-any.whl (39.8 kB view hashes)

Uploaded Python 2 Python 3

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page