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

Each wrapper binds every function declared in the corresponding SDK header (for ps6000a including ps6000aApiExperimental.h). Functions that the installed driver does not export raise MissingFunctionException when called, so an older driver version does not prevent the wrapper from loading.

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. By default, a status other than PICO_OK raises a StatusException (see Status handling).

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

scope = PicoScope6000aWrapper()

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

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)

Status handling

Non-OK statuses fall into three categories, each handled by one of the actions "raise" (raise StatusException), "warn" (emit a StatusWarning) or "ignore". Unless a method raises, it still returns the status.

Examples for info statuses are the power-source statuses returned by ps3000aOpenUnit or ps5000aCurrentPowerSource (e.g. PICO_POWER_SUPPLY_NOT_CONNECTED) and PICO_WAITING_FOR_DATA_BUFFERS from ps6000aGetStreamingLatestValues.

Like NumPy's seterr/errstate, the configuration is global rather than per wrapper instance:

import pycosdk

# Process-wide; returns the previous settings.
old = pycosdk.seterr(error="warn", info="warn")
pycosdk.seterr(**old)

# Temporarily, as context manager or decorator. Overrides are local to the
# current thread / asyncio task.
with pycosdk.errstate(error="ignore"):
    status = scope.ps6000aStop(handle)

try:
    scope.ps6000aSetChannelOn(handle, ...)
except pycosdk.StatusException as e:
    print(e.function, e.status)

Callbacks registered with the driver (e.g. via RunBlock or the Set*InteractionCallback functions) receive the status as a parameter and are not subject to this configuration. The wrappers keep references to the callback objects handed to the driver, so passing a lambda is safe.

Type checking

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

License

MIT License — see LICENSE.