Supported file types

Overview

Plugins are under active development. Stable plugins are documented below with their available options. Plugins under beta testing are available upon request.

File format	File extensions	Status
CSV	.csv, .txt, .zip, ...	Stable
MDF	.mdf, .mf4	Stable
Matlab	.mat	Beta testing
TDMS	.tdms	Beta testing
HDF5	.h5	Beta testing
Parquet	.parquet, .pqt	Beta testing
Rosbag	.bag	Beta testing
Ulog (PX4)	.ulg	Beta testing
Apache Avro	.avro	Beta testing
MAVLink	.bin	Beta testing

Custom plugins

Do you have files in a different format? Our technical team can create a custom plugin for your data format.

Get in touch with [email protected] to discuss your use case.

CSV

Plugin name: csv

The CSV plugin has a lot of options for configuration (see below). Key points:

• The time column can be configured (but defaults to time)

• Time can be a number or date string format. (preferably YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss)

• CSV zips are supported through --unzip

• Two main shapes are supported: tab (example 1) and tsv (example 2)

Example 1: Tabular (tab)

time,altitude,speed,engine_temp,fuel_level,battery_voltage
s,m,km/h,°C,%,V
0.0,0.0,0.0,90.0,100.0,12.6
1.0,10.0,20.0,91.0,99.5,12.6
2.0,25.0,40.0,92.0,99.0,12.5
3.0,50.0,60.0,93.0,98.4,12.5
4.0,80.0,75.0,94.0,97.8,12.4
5.0,120.0,85.0,95.0,97.2,12.4
6.0,160.0,90.0,96.0,96.5,12.3
7.0,200.0,88.0,96.5,95.7,12.3
8.0,240.0,70.0,97.0,94.9,12.2
9.0,260.0,40.0,96.0,94.3,12.2

Example 2: Time Signal Value (tsv)

time,signal,value
0.0,altitude,0.0
0.0,speed,0.0
0.0,battery_voltage,12.6
1.0,altitude,10.0
1.0,speed,20.0
1.0,battery_voltage,12.6
2.0,altitude,25.0
2.0,speed,40.0
2.0,battery_voltage,12.5
3.0,altitude,50.0
3.0,speed,60.0

Available options

Option	Default value	Details
--time-col	time	Name of the time column
--combined-time-col	[ ]	Supply multiple time column names
--shape	tab	If the data is organised tabular (tab), or tsv with only three columns (time, signal, value)
--delimiter	,	Character that splits the columns
--decimal	.	Character that show decimal point
--thousands	None	Character that splits 1000s
--quotechar	"	Character indicating strings
--encoding	latin-1	See list of available encodings here
--chunksize	1 million (1e6)	Number of rows consumed at once
--skiprows	0	Rows to be ignored at the top of the file
--dayfirst	true	Parse dates with the day first (e.g. 23/08/2025)
--time-factor	1 billion (1e9)	Factor to convert time to nanoseconds
--header	[ ]	Names for the columns, instead of using the first row
--units	false	Read units from the second line (tab only)
--unzip	false	The input file is a .zip file which contains .csv files
--group-by-filename	false	Add the file name as a signal group
--signal-col	signal	Column to use for signal names (tsv only)
--value-col	value	Column to use for values (tsv only)
--unit-col	None	Column to use for units (tsv only)
--metadata_col	[ ]	Columns to use for metadata (tsv only)

A general example of how these options can be correctly used in Marple DB:

MDF

Plugin name: mdf

Can import files generated according to the ASAM Measurement Data Format version 4 (MF4) standard. Binary MDF files cannot be parsed but needs to converted using a .dbc file first.

Option	Default value	Details
--chunksize	10 million (1e7)	Number of datapoints in each processed chunk. Large values may result in too much use of RAM and crashing
--time-factor	1 billion (1e9)	Factor to convert time to nanoseconds