pyinstruments 0.2.0

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

=============================================
pyinstruments: data acquisition toolkit
=============================================

*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:

- ivi drivers (using the lower level package pyivi)
- visa
- serial

Using IVI-drivers greatly simplifies your life because :

1/. The lower level layer is fully transparent for the user (pyivi provides a common interface for each instrument type).

2/. **zero** extra work is needed 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!).

- **pyhardwaredb** for the hardware communication (This package itself is a thin wrapper around pyhardware)
because it heavily relies on ivi-drivers and com-interoperability, this package is intended to run on a windows machine.
- **curvefinder** to display in quasi real-time the curves acquired (This module could be run on any platform).

The strict separation between plotting and data-acquistion processes ensures that scripted data-acquisitions won't be affected by user interactions or plotting dead-times.


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...

The hardware module has a Graphical User Interface to quickly get a curve from an instrument and configure the way instruments are interfaced.

Dependencies
============

Direct dependancies for pyinstruments are:
- django > 1.5
- PyQt4
- guidata
- guiqwt
- pyhardware <-- pyivi <-- (ctypes + comtypes)

The windows installer takes care of installing all the dependencies.


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 and feedback
are warmly welcome!

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