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

Latest change Weekly build

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.

Generating the headers

Protocol Buffers messages are defined in a .proto file, which follows a standard format that is compatible with all Protocol Buffers libraries. To use it with nanopb, you need to generate .pb.c and .pb.h files from it:

python generator/nanopb_generator.py myprotocol.proto  # For source checkout
generator-bin/nanopb_generator myprotocol.proto        # For binary package

(Note: For instructions for nanopb-0.3.9.x and older, see the documentation of that particular version here)

The binary packages for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X should contain all necessary dependencies, including Python, python-protobuf library and protoc. If you are using a git checkout or a plain source distribution, you will need to install Python separately. Once you have Python, you can install the other dependencies with pip install --upgrade protobuf grpcio-tools.

You can further customize the header generation by creating an .options file. See documentation for details.

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 or pip install scons). 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.

For embedded platforms, there is currently support for running the tests on STM32 discovery board and simavr AVR simulator. Use scons PLATFORM=STM32 and scons PLATFORM=AVR to run these tests.

Build systems and integration

Nanopb C code itself is designed to be portable and easy to build on any platform. Often the bigger hurdle is running the generator which takes in the .proto files and outputs .pb.c definitions.

There exist build rules for several systems:

And also integration to platform interfaces:

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-0.4.7.dev1355.tar.gz (81.4 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

nanopb-0.4.7.dev1355-py2.py3-none-any.whl (50.0 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 2 Python 3

File details

Details for the file nanopb-0.4.7.dev1355.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: nanopb-0.4.7.dev1355.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 81.4 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: poetry/1.2.1 CPython/3.8.10 Linux/5.15.0-1020-azure

File hashes

Hashes for nanopb-0.4.7.dev1355.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 4e93e7dddef9fdaf20d71501c029059bef30be826f89aad9ae28036a7ff756d8
MD5 7bfbbb764de6224b2d312e698abe04ce
BLAKE2b-256 2b2d3fa74ad9fb96ebf8ed3f58ed3a093853ee4b1c667a85575f21af92ba245d

See more details on using hashes here.

File details

Details for the file nanopb-0.4.7.dev1355-py2.py3-none-any.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: nanopb-0.4.7.dev1355-py2.py3-none-any.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 50.0 kB
  • Tags: Python 2, Python 3
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: poetry/1.2.1 CPython/3.8.10 Linux/5.15.0-1020-azure

File hashes

Hashes for nanopb-0.4.7.dev1355-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 314bfa90293ec2fce3cd0d8d9e414d0634281ab75a00678e4ce0712898b3376e
MD5 e26729fa53f902b0b4ccee681f6fee40
BLAKE2b-256 01a1bea4261316fe6dc205b4c31f4bd531c17e206bb45ee2b7975083cd3a99d0

See more details on using hashes here.

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