Description

PyVISA started as a wrapper for the NI-VISA library and therefore you need to install the National Instruments VISA library in your system. This works most of the time, for most people. But sometimes you need to test PyVISA without the physical devices or even without NI-VISA.

Starting from version 1.6, PyVISA allows to use different backends. These backends can be dynamically loaded. PyVISA-sim is one of such backends. It implements most of the methods for Message Based communication (Serial/USB/GPIB/Ethernet) in a simulated environment. The behaviour of simulated devices can be controlled by a simple plain text configuration file.

VISA and Python

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

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

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

• It has a very 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 2.6 and 2.7, 3.2+)

• PyVISA 1.6+

Installation

Using pip:

$ pip install -U pyvisa-sim

or install the development version:

$ pip install -U https://github.com/hgrecco/pyvisa-sim/zipball/master

PyVISA is automatically installed if needed.

Documentation

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

pyvisa-sim is written and maintained by Hernan E. Grecco <hernan.grecco@gmail.com>.

Other contributors, listed alphabetically, are:

• Adam Vaughn <avaughn@intersil.com>

• Colin Marquardt <github@marquardt-home.de>

• Huan Nguyen <famish99@gmail.com>

• Matthieu Dartiailh <marul@laposte.net>

0.4 (unreleased)

• Nothing changed yet.

0.3 (2015-08-25)

• Fixed bug in get_device_dict. (Issue #37)

• Move resource name parsing to pyvisa.rname.

• Implemented query in list_resources.

• Add support for USB RAW.

• Warn the user when no eom is specified for device type and use LF.

0.2 (2015-05-19)

• Add support for channels. (Issue #9, thanks MatthieuDartiailh)

• Add support for error queue. (Issue #26, thanks MatthieuDartiailh)

• Add support for TCPIP SOCKET. (Issue #29, thanks MatthieuDartiailh)

• Removed resource string parsing in favour of to pyvisa.rname.

• Changed find_resource and find_next in favour of list_resources.

• Implemented new loader with bases and versioning enforcing. (Issue #16)

• Renamed is_resource to bundled in yaml files.

• Added support for an empty response. (Issue #15, thanks famish99)

• Several small fixes and better VISA compliance.

• Better error reporting and debug info.

0.1 (2015-02-12)

• First public release.

• Basic ASRL INSTR functionality.

• Basic USB INSTR functionality.

• Basic TCPIP INSTR functionality.