Compatibility

Clients & Servers

PyTAK is used in mission criticial environments, every day, across all official TAK Products:

PyTAK has been tested and is compatible with many situational awareness (SA) & common operating picture (COP) systems:

I/O & Network Protocols

PyTAK supports the following I/O & network protocols:

TLS Unicast: tls://host:port (see TLS Support section below)
TCP Unicast: tcp://host:port
UDP Multicast: udp://group:port (aka Mesh SA)
UDP Unicast: udp://host:port
UDP Broadcast: udp+broadcast://network:port
UDP Write-only: udp+wo://host:port
stdout or stderr: log://stdout or log://stderr

Python 3.6+

PyTAK requires Python 3.6 or above and WILL NOT work on Python versions below 3.6. It should run on almost any platform that supports Python 3.6+, including Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi, Android, et al.

FreeTAKServer

FTS (Free TAK Server) has built-in anti-Denial-of-Service (DoS) support, which restricts the number of CoT Events a client can send to a listening TCP Port. Currently this FTS feature cannot be disabled or changed, so clients must meter their input speed.

To use a PyTAK-based client with FTS, set the FTS_COMPAT configuration parameter to True. This will cause the PyTAK client to sleep a random number of seconds between transmitting CoT to a FTS server:

FTS_COMPAT = True

Alternatively you can specify a static sleep period by setting PYTAK_SLEEP to an integer number of seconds:

PYTAK_SLEEP = 3

TAK Protocol Payload - Version 1 (Protobuf)

Version 1 of the TAK Protocol Payload is a Google Protocol Buffer based payload. Each Payload consists of one (and only one) atakmap::commoncommo::v1::TakMessage message which is serialized using Google protocol buffers version 3.

Source: https://github.com/deptofdefense/AndroidTacticalAssaultKit-CIV/blob/master/commoncommo/core/impl/protobuf/protocol.txt

PyTAK natively sends and receives “TAK Protocol Payload - Version 0”, aka plain XML. If you’d like to receive & decode “Version 1” protobuf with PyTAK, install the optional takproto Python module:

When installing PyTAK:

$ python3 -m pip install pytak[with_takproto]

Alternative, installing from a Debian package:

$ TK TK

Here is an example of receiving & decoding “Version 1” using takproto.

N.B. The data type returned from this implementation differs from that of the “Version 0” implementation (bytes vs object):

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import asyncio

from configparser import ConfigParser

import takproto

import pytak


class MyRXWorker(pytak.RXWorker):
    async def readcot(self):
        if hasattr(self.reader, 'readuntil'):
            cot = await self.reader.readuntil("</event>".encode("UTF-8"))
        elif hasattr(self.reader, 'recv'):
            cot, src = await self.reader.recv()
        tak_v1 = takproto.parse_proto(cot)
        if tak_v1 != -1:
            cot = tak_v1
        return cot


async def my_setup(clitool) -> None:
    reader, writer = await pytak.protocol_factory(clitool.config)
    write_worker = pytak.TXWorker(clitool.tx_queue, clitool.config, writer)
    read_worker = MyRXWorker(clitool.rx_queue, clitool.config, reader)
    clitool.add_task(write_worker)
    clitool.add_task(read_worker)


async def main():
    """
    The main definition of your program, sets config params and
    adds your serializer to the asyncio task list.
    """
    config = ConfigParser()
    config["mycottool"] = {"COT_URL": "udp://239.2.3.1:6969"}
    config = config["mycottool"]

    # Initializes worker queues and tasks.
    clitool = pytak.CLITool(config)
    await my_setup(clitool)

    # Start all tasks.
    await clitool.run()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())