Rich Collier

There’s a few steps that aren’t documented elsewhere. This is the process that worked for me. Happy to give advice if you have any issues with this install. You’ll need python installed, I’m not documenting that here, just Google the phrase “osx install python” for instructions.

Pop open your terminal. If you don’t know your way around terminal in a *nix based environment, jump in and follow along. It’s not as intimidating as it may seem.

Use the cd command to navigate to a folder in your home dir. Mine is called code but you can put this in whatever directory you like. Clone some dependencies and the PID-Analyzer repository from Github:

git clone https://github.com/cleanflight/blackbox-tools.git blackbox-tools
git clone https://github.com/Plasmatree/PID-Analyzer.git PID-Analyzer

Build the blackbox-tools software:

cd blackbox-tools
brew install cairo -without-x11 pkg-config
make

Now get Plasmatree going:

cd ../PID-Analyzer
pip install -r requirements.txt

If all of the above was successful, then you’ve now installed the software. Now, let’s make a bash function that makes it easier to run Plasmatree.

Edit your bash profile with a text editor. The file is at ~/.bash_profile and you want to add the following to the end of the file:

function plasmatree() {
python ~/code/PID-Analyzer/PID-Analyzer.py --blackbox_decode ~/code/blackbox-tools/obj/blackbox_decode -l $1
}

Save the file, and run source ~/.bash_profile in your terminal. Now you can execute Plasmatree quickly and easily like so:

plasmatree /path/to/blackbox/log/file.bbl

I hope that works for you. If not, let me know what went wrong and I’ll try to update accordingly.