ax25

This crate aims to provide everything you need to write cross-platform packet radio software in Rust.

• Encode and decode AX.25 frames (currently supporting v2.0)
• KISS protocol
• Connect to TNCs via multiple methods without needing to change your code

Quick Start

Most developers will want to focus on tnc::TncAddress and tnc::Tnc.

1. Generate or ask the user to supply an address string. This takes the form:
   tnc:tcpkiss:192.168.0.1:8001 or
   tnc:linuxif:vk7ntk-2
2. Parse this to an address: let addr = string.parse::<TncAddress>()?;
3. Attempt to open the TNC: let tnc = Tnc::open(&addr)?;
4. Use send_frame() and receive_frame() to communicate on the radio.
5. The Tnc can be cloned for multithreaded use.

If your application requires encoding/decoding AX.25 data directly, see the frame module.

Example

This following is one of the included example programs, listen.rs. It is a poor imitation of axlisten.

use ax25::tnc::{Tnc, TncAddress};
use chrono::prelude::*;
use std::env;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let args: Vec<String> = env::args().collect();
    if args.len() != 2 {
        println!("Usage: {} <tnc-address>", args[0]);
        println!("where tnc-address is something like");
        println!("  tnc:linuxif:vk7ntk-2");
        println!("  tnc:tcpkiss:192.168.0.1:8001");
        std::process::exit(1);
    }

    let addr = args[1].parse::<TncAddress>()?;
    let tnc = Tnc::open(&addr)?;

    while let Ok(frame) = tnc.receive_frame() {
        println!("{}", Local::now());
        println!("{}", frame);
    }
    Ok(())
}

It produces output like the following. Note that it must be run with sudo when using the Linux interface.

$ sudo ./target/debug/examples/listen tnc:linuxif:vk7ntk-2
2020-02-02 21:51:11.017220715 +11:00
Source		VK7NTK-1
Destination	IDENT
Data		"hello this is a test"

The above is the Display implementation for Ax25Frame - full protocol information is available through its fields which are not printed here.

Roadmap

Planned features:

• Support for serial KISS TNCs (physical, TNC-Pi, Dire Wolf pseudo-tty)
• Paclen management
• More convenient send/receive interfaces for messing around with UI frames
• Direct use of linux axports interfaces without kissattach