pyinstruments 0.1.17

Control of data acquisition with remote instruments using (IVI-)dotnet, (IVI-)COM, Visa, and serial protocols. python dotnet and/or comtypes should be installed

program less and do more science… better

What is it

pyinstruments is a Python package to control/get data from measurement and automation devices. Control of the remote instruments can be done via one of the following protocols:

• Visa

• pythondotnet

• comtypes

• serial

The syntax of the higher level functions follows the IVI (Interchangeable Virtual Instruments) guidelines. This allows:

1/. a lower level layer fully transparent for the user.

2/. zero extra work to interface an instrument for which an IVI driver is provided.

pyinstruments is composed of two independant packages (can be run on 2 remote computers!).

• pyhardware for the hardware communication

• curvefinder to display in quasi real-time the curves acquired.

In this way, in the case of scripted data-acquisition, the process is not affected at all by the plotting and user interactions.

Main Features

The curves are stored in a (django-abstracted) database with all necessary metadata (bandwidth, averaging…) together with a list of user-defined tags and comments. The curvefinder module allows monitoring new incoming curves, as well as querying the database for old curve by date, tags…

For simple tasks, the hardware module also has a simple Graphical User Interface to quickly get a curve from an instrument…

Note: the hardware package can also be used independantly of the other modules.

Note2: in a near future, the modularity of the hardware package will increase, in particular, external instrumentation drivers will be easily imported and an independant package to interface IVI-instruments will be released.

Dependencies

• pythondotnet: The hardware package requires windows OS to interface instruments via the dotnet protocol. The plotting one could run under any OS. Builds for windows can be found at http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pythonnet

• Pandas http://pandas.pydata.org/ __ 0.10.1 or higher

• PyQt4

• guidata

• guiqwt

• django __ 1.5 or higher

Try it out!

The installation is single click (since v 0.1.15), desktop icons are created to launch both graphical user interfaces.

The project is hosted on GitHub, and still in a starting phase, contributions are warmly welcome!

<https://github.com/SamuelDeleglise/pyinstruments>