Skip to main content

Python VISA bindings for GPIB, RS232, TCPIP and USB instruments

Project description

Continuous integration Documentation building Keysight assisted testing Code Coverage Documentation Status PyPI - License PyPI https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.05304/status.svg

A Python package for support of the “Virtual Instrument Software Architecture” (VISA), in order to control measurement devices and test equipment via GPIB, RS232, Ethernet or USB.

Description

The programming of measurement instruments can be real pain. There are many different protocols, sent over many different interfaces and bus systems (GPIB, RS232, USB). For every programming language you want to use, you have to find libraries that support both your device and its bus system.

In order to ease this unfortunate situation, the Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA) specification was defined in the middle of the 90’s. Today VISA is implemented on all significant operating systems. A couple of vendors offer VISA libraries, partly with free download. These libraries work together with arbitrary peripheral devices, although they may be limited to certain interface devices, such as the vendor’s GPIB card.

The VISA specification has explicit bindings to Visual Basic, C, and G (LabVIEW’s graphical language). Python can be used to call functions from a VISA shared library (.dll, .so, .dylib) allowing to directly leverage the standard implementations. In addition, Python can be used to directly access most bus systems used by instruments which is why one can envision to implement the VISA standard directly in Python (see the PyVISA-Py project for more details). PyVISA is both a Python wrapper for VISA shared libraries but can also serve as a front-end for other VISA implementation such as PyVISA-Py.

VISA and Python

Python has a couple of features that make it very interesting for controlling instruments:

  • Python is an easy-to-learn scripting language with short development cycles.

  • It represents a high abstraction level [2], which perfectly blends with the abstraction level of measurement programs.

  • It has a rich set of native libraries, including numerical and plotting modules for data analysis and visualisation.

  • A large set of books (in many languages) and on-line publications is available.

Requirements

  • Python (tested with 3.6+)

  • VISA (tested with NI-VISA 17.5, Win7, from www.ni.com/visa and Keysight-VISA )

Installation

Using pip:

$ pip install pyvisa

or easy_install:

$ easy_install pyvisa

or download and unzip the source distribution file and:

$ python setup.py install

Documentation

The documentation can be read online at https://pyvisa.readthedocs.org

Citing

If you are using this package, you can cite the PyVISA publication

Grecco et al., (2023). PyVISA: the Python instrumentation package. Journal of Open Source Software, 8(84), 5304, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05304

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

PyVISA-1.14.1.tar.gz (234.7 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

PyVISA-1.14.1-py3-none-any.whl (176.7 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 3

File details

Details for the file PyVISA-1.14.1.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: PyVISA-1.14.1.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 234.7 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/4.0.2 CPython/3.9.18

File hashes

Hashes for PyVISA-1.14.1.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 71030041ed4c5dad77687454cf44b8be4d1642e9d1aaa22019248d41d8ed7a79
MD5 30b2a8202a2c5d704c788f26e2c2cf86
BLAKE2b-256 1a77577366efd9cff08ddfedcf14f678ff57bb1a6287ccdf157972e6d9e7b494

See more details on using hashes here.

File details

Details for the file PyVISA-1.14.1-py3-none-any.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: PyVISA-1.14.1-py3-none-any.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 176.7 kB
  • Tags: Python 3
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/4.0.2 CPython/3.9.18

File hashes

Hashes for PyVISA-1.14.1-py3-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 6e4dfc9b6029b4f00d0d4960348c4889c2747aa7f83276950d48a349eab36a45
MD5 43f5f58c92aa61a021cc3db7e21a9ecb
BLAKE2b-256 99a00e739df84e0fc61abecc6b4b70ad7aea7f5d7ee37ec504baa365c0fec9da

See more details on using hashes here.

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page