pycosdk

Yet another wrapper for the PicoSDK.

pycosdk is a thin, fully type-annotated ctypes binding to Pico Technology's PicoScope driver libraries. It stays deliberately close to the C API: method names mirror the driver functions, and the enums and structs are transcribed from the SDK headers as IntEnum/IntFlag and ctypes.Structure types.

Requirements

• Python 3.11+
• The PicoSDK drivers, installed separately. pycosdk does not bundle or install them — it locates the shared libraries at runtime via ctypes.util.find_library. Download them from picotech.com/downloads.

Installation

pip install pycosdk

Supported drivers

Coverage is not exhaustive — each wrapper binds the subset of the driver API that has been needed so far.

Usage

Instantiating a wrapper loads the corresponding shared library. Pass an explicit library_path if it is not on the default search path; otherwise a MissingLibraryException is raised when the library cannot be found.

Methods return the driver's PICO_STATUS as an enum member, followed by any output parameters. Statuses are returned, not raised — check them yourself.

from pycosdk import (
    PICO_BANDWIDTH_LIMITER,
    PICO_CHANNEL,
    PICO_CONNECT_PROBE_RANGE,
    PICO_COUPLING,
    PICO_DEVICE_RESOLUTION,
    PICO_STATUS,
    PicoScope6000aWrapper,
)

scope = PicoScope6000aWrapper()

status, handle = scope.ps6000aOpenUnit(None, PICO_DEVICE_RESOLUTION.PICO_DR_8BIT)
assert status == PICO_STATUS.PICO_OK

status = scope.ps6000aSetChannelOn(
    handle,
    PICO_CHANNEL.PICO_CHANNEL_A,
    PICO_COUPLING.PICO_DC_50OHM,
    PICO_CONNECT_PROBE_RANGE.PICO_X1_PROBE_1V,
    0.0,
    PICO_BANDWIDTH_LIMITER.PICO_BW_FULL,
)

scope.ps6000aCloseUnit(handle)

Type checking

The package ships a py.typed marker, so annotations are visible to mypy, pyright, and friends.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.