Rust VDIF

A rust crate for interacting with data encoded in the VLBI Data Interchange Format (VDIF). The VDIF data format is defined in the VDIF specification, found here.

This is a minimalist crate with a single dependency (time) designed to relieve the problem of dealing with VDIF data in your own applications.

Usage

In rustvdif, any type implementing std::io::Read and std::io::Seek can be wrapped in the central VDIFReader type, like so:

let file = BufReader::new(File::open("my/vdif/file").unwrap());
let mut reader = VDIFReader::new(file).unwrap();
// Print the first 10 headers.
for i in 0..10 {
    let header = reader.get_header().unwrap();
    println!("{}", header);
    reader.next(&header).unwrap();
};

A VDIFReader interprets VDIF data as a continuous stream, which makes it easy to adapt this to networking scenarios.

Wishlist

I'd like to add the following over time:

• Implement an easy to use TCP buffer.
• Implement an easy to use UDP buffer, which maintains the order of incoming frames as much as possible.
• Better API for EDV data.
• Better datetime interfaces for the header.
• Implement common operations for the payload such as those contained in the baseband-tasks library.
• Tests!

Contributing

I'd love to see contributions from the VLBI community, but if you have any suggestions or questions you can always reach out to me directly.

Licensing

This library is licensed under either the MIT License or the Apache 2.0 License at your option.