Welcome to asammdf’s documentation!

asammdf is a fast parser/editor for ASAM (Associtation for Standardisation of Automation and Measuring Systems) MDF (Measurement Data Format) files.

asammdf supports both MDF version 3 and 4 formats.

asammdf works on Python 2.7, and Python >= 3.4

Project goals

The main goals for this library are:

  • to be faster than the other Python based mdf libraries
  • to have clean and easy to understand code base

Features

  • read sorted and unsorted MDF v3 and v4 files

  • files are loaded in RAM for fast operations

    • for low memory computers or for large data files there is the option to load only the metadata and leave the raw channel data (the samples) unread; this of course will mean slower channel data access speed
  • extract channel data, master channel and extra channel information as Signal objects for unified operations with v3 and v4 files

  • time domain operation using the Signal class

    • Pandas data frames are good if all the channels have the same time based
    • usually a measuremetn will have channels from different sources at different rates
    • the Signal class facilitates operations with such channels
  • remove data group by index or by specifing a channel name inside the target data group

  • append new channels

  • filter a subset of channels from original mdf file

  • convert to different mdf version

  • export to Excel, HDF5 and CSV

  • add and extract attachments

  • mdf 4.10 zipped blocks

Major features still not implemented

  • functionality related to sample reduction block (but the class is defined)
  • mdf 3 channel dependency append (reading and saving file with CDBLOCKs is implemented)
  • handling of unfinnished measurements (mdf 4)
  • mdf 4 channel arrays
  • xml schema for TXBLOCK and MDBLOCK

Dependencies

asammdf uses the following libraries

  • numpy : the heart that makes all tick
  • numexpr : for algebraic and rational channel conversions
  • matplotlib : for Signal plotting

optional dependencies needed for exports

  • pandas : for DataFrame export
  • h5py : for HDF5 export
  • xlsxwriter : for Excel export

Installation

asammdf is available on

pip install asammdf

Benchmarks

asammdf relies heavily on dict objects. Starting with Python 3.6 the dict objects are more compact and ordered (implementation detail); asammdf uses takes advantage of those changes so for best performance it is advised to use Python >= 3.6.

Indices and tables