pydwf 0.7.12

A package to control Digilent Waveforms devices

pydwf

This is the README of pydwf, a Python package to control the Digilent Waveforms electronic test and measurement devices made by Digilent.

It wraps all functions of libdwf, the low-level C library provided by Digilent, in an easy-to-use, class-based Python API. Like the C library, the pydwf package supports Windows, Linux (Intel and ARM), and macOS.

The current release of pydwf is version 0.7.12. It is intended to be used with version 3.16.3 of libdwf.

The pydwf package comes with documentation (sparse, but improving) and a considerable number of ready-to-run examples, demonstrating how pydwf can be used to perform common and not-so-common measurement tasks.

A command-line tool is provided that can be used, among other things, to list the available Digilent devices and their configurations.

This README file contains information about the project. Readers who want to learn how to use pydwf are referred to the API documentation.

Supported devices

The following devices can be controlled using pydwf:

• Electronics Explorer (legacy)
• Analog Discovery (legacy)
• Analog Discovery 2
• Digital Discovery
• Analog Discovery Studio
• Analog Discovery Pro (3250, 3450)

The pydwf package has been extensively tested with the Analog Discovery 2 and Digital Discovery devices. It should also work with the other devices listed, but these haven't been tested. If you have such a device and encounter problems, please report an issue on the Github issue tracker.

Dependencies

The pydwf package requires Python 3.6 or higher.

In order for pydwf to work, recent versions of the the Digilent Adept and Digilent Waveforms packages must be installed. These provide the C libraries that pydwf uses to interact with devices. Generally speaking, if the Waveforms GUI application provided by Digilent works on your system, you're good to go.

pydwf depends on the numpy package to handle the considerable amount of data transferred between the PC and Digilent devices when performing high-speed signal generation or capture operations.

Some of the examples depend on the matplotlib package, but pydwf itself will work without it.

Project hosting

The project repository and issue tracker are hosted on Github:

https://github.com/sidneycadot/pydwf/

Installation using pip

The installable package is hosted on PyPI:

https://pypi.org/project/pydwf/

This allows installation using the standard pip (or pip3) tool:

pip install pydwf

After installing pydwf, the following command will show the version of pydwf and the underlying DWF library:

python -m pydwf version

The following command will list all Digilent Waveforms devices connected to the system and, for each of them, list the supported configurations:

python -m pydwf list -c

Documentation

The project documentation is hosted on readthedocs and can be reached via the following link:

https://pydwf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

If desired, the documentation can also be installed locally after installing the package by executing the following command:

python -m pydwf extract-html-docs

This will create a local directory called pydwf-docs-html containing the project documentation in HTML format.

Alternatively, a PDF version of the manual can be extracted as well:

python -m pydwf extract-pdf-manual

Please note that the documentation is not yet complete — it's a big API!

Examples

The Python examples can be installed locally after installing the pydwf package by executing the following command:

python -m pydwf extract-examples

This will create a local directory called pydwf-examples containing the Python examples that demonstrate many of the capabilities of the Digilent devices and pydwf.

These examples are intended as a useful starting point for your own Python scripts. See the Examples overview for more information.