Frequently asked questions

What is Cyphal?

Cyphal is an open technology for real-time intravehicular distributed computing and communication based on modern networking standards (Ethernet, CAN FD, etc.). It was created to address the challenge of on-board deterministic computing and data distribution in next-generation intelligent vehicles: manned and unmanned aircraft, spacecraft, robots, and cars. The project was once known as UAVCAN.

How can I deploy PyCyphal on my embedded system?

PyCyphal is mostly designed for high-level user-facing software for R&D, diagnostic, and testing applications. We have Cyphal implementations in other programming languages that are built specifically for embedded systems; please find more info at opencyphal.org.

PyCyphal seems complex. Does that mean that Cyphal is a complex protocol?

Cyphal is a very simple protocol. This particular implementation may appear convoluted because it is very generic and provides a very high-level API. For comparison, there is a minimal Cyphal-over-CAN implementation in C called libcanard that is only ~1k SLoC large.

I am getting ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'uavcan'. Do I need to install additional packages?

We no longer ship the public regulated DSDL definitions together with Cyphal implementations in order to simplify maintenance and integration; also, this underlines our commitment to make vendor-specific (or application-specific) data types first-class citizens in Cyphal. Please read the user documentation to learn how to generate Python packages from DSDL namespaces.

Imports fail with AttributeError: module 'uavcan...' has no attribute '...'. What am I doing wrong?

Remove the legacy library: pip uninstall -y uavcan. Read the Installation guide for details.