Introduction (A Brief History)

CalPack was created out of necessity for creating a way to parse custom packets in the space industry. These packets, typically stored in binary data files, would come from multiple unique interfaces (e.g. 1553) or common ones (e.g. UDP) with very custom data structures.

Naturally, ctypes was the first place I went to, but inspecting packet definitions using the syntax that ctypes used was confusing and not easy to use. Autocompletion of IDE’s didn’t pick up the field names and the reader had to have a basic knowledge of ctypes. And then CalPack was born.

But why CalPack? My first born is named Calvin and I wanted to name something after him as a tribute to him. Secondly, typing out transmogrifier is a nightmare. Finally, who doesn’t like Calvin and Hobbes?

Installation

CalPack is hosted on pypi and can be installed by simply using pypi:

>>> pypi install CalPack

You can also install from the GitHub repo source:

>>> git clone https://github.com/KronoSKoderS/CalPack.git
>>> cd CalPack
>>> python setup.py install