[Documentation 📚]

Pycatzao

Pycatzao is a pure Python library for encoding, decoding and compressing Asterix CAT240 messages.

📚 Usage & Documentation

Pycatzao releases are available as wheel packages for macOS, Windows and Linux on PyPI. Install it using pip:

$ pip install pycatzao

If you prefer installing this library from source, run:

# optional
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ pip install -e .

After installing, simply import pycatzao and start fooling around with its API:

import pycatzao

print("Version:", pycatzao.__version__)

for block in pycatzao.decode_file("my-cat240-data.bin"):
    process_cat240_block(
        range=block["r"],
        azimuth=block["az"],
        amplitude=block["amp"],
        ...
    )  # do something meaningful with the data

See examples/cat240toHDF5.py for a more elaborated example or our documentation for a full list of available functions. Note, however, that you won't find an introduction into Asterix CAT240 here since we assume that you know the basics of the standard. If you need such an introduction though, simply search for Asterix CAT240 with a search engine of your choice or directly consult https://www.eurocontrol.int/asterix.

🎯 Goals

The purpose of this project is to have a slim and Python-only library with almost no dependencies. We don't plan to add support for other Asterix formats and there are certainly other libraries out there than can parse Asterix CAT240 faster than Pycatzao. However, does this mean that Pycatzao is slow? Certainly not! Pycatzao can easily parse data faster than real-time. On a decently equipped laptop one hour of compressed data is decoded in less than 100 seconds; this is more than 60k message per second... fast enough for most applications.

👷 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you find any issues or have suggestions for improvements, please feel free to submit a pull request.

Development Setup

To set up your development environment, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository:

   $ git clone git@github.com:DLR-KN/pycatzao.git
   

2. Change to the project directory:

   $ cd pycatzao
   

3. Install the development dependencies using pip:

   $ pip install -e .[dev]
   

Pre-Commit-Hooks

To maintain code quality and avoid pushing invalid commits, we recommend using pre-commit hooks. These hooks perform automated checks before commits are made. To set up pre-commit hooks, follow these steps:

1. Install the pre-commit package (if not already installed):

   $ pip install pre-commit
   

2. Install the hooks:

   $ pre-commit install
   

Now, each time you commit changes, the pre-commit hooks will run checks such as formatting, linting, and more. If any issues are found, they will be flagged before the commit is made.

Running Tests

You can run tests using the following command:

$ pytest --cov=pycatzao

Make sure to run tests before submitting a pull request to ensure that everything is functioning as expected.

Generate documentation (optional)

If you like, you can generate the documentation locally by navigating to the docs/ folder and running:

$ cd docs && make html
[...]
The HTML pages are in build/html.

This will generate an HTML documentation under docs/build/html/. Open the generated index.html with a browser and start reading🤓