pymicrodxp 1.1.0

High-performance driver for XIA microDXP hardware.

pymicrodxp

pymicrodxp is a Python-based RS-232 hardware driver and interactive command-line utility for the XIA microDXP Rev H and J hardware. It provides both a robust API for developers and a fully-featured interactive shell for hardware testing, diagnostics, and trace visualization.

Features

• Interactive Hardware Shell: A stateful command-line interface for rapid hardware debugging.
• Diagnostic Trace Capture: Easily capture, log, and visualize 8,000-point diagnostic traces (ADC, Filters, Baselines).
• Built-in Visualization: Interactive matplotlib plotting for hardware traces.
• Session Logging: All shell inputs and hardware outputs are automatically piped to an ISO 8601-timestamped log file with automatic log rotation.
• Cross-Platform: Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Includes a tkinter-based file picker for seamless data loading.

Prerequisites

• Python: 3.9 or newer.
• OS-Specific Hardware Permissions (Linux Only): By default, Linux distributions restrict access to serial ports. To allow your user to communicate with the microDXP (e.g., via /dev/ttyUSB0), you must add your user account to the dialout group. Refer to your distribution's documentation on using usermod to add a user to the dialout group. Note: You must log out and log back in (or restart your computer) for this permission change to take effect.

Installation

If you are using pymicrodxp to interface with the hardware and capture data, set up your environment as follows:

# Install core driver
pip install pymicrodxp

# Install with interactive shell and plotting
pip install pymicrodxp[shell]

This will install the library and automatically register the microdxp terminal command on your system.

Interactive Shell

The easiest way to interact with the board is using the built-in shell. The shell keeps the serial port open between commands for extremely fast readouts.

Launch the shell and automatically connect:

microdxp -u serial://COM3          (Windows Serial)
microdxp -u serial:///dev/ttyUSB0  (Linux Serial)

Linux Users: If you receive a "Permission Denied" error when connecting to hardware:

1. Add your user to the dialout group: sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER
2. Log out and log back in for changes to take effect.

Shell commands

Once inside the (microdxp) shell, you can type help to see a full list of commands, or use <command> -h for specific details. The commands are broken down into the following categories:

• Session & Connections: connect <uri>, disconnect, view [filename], exit
• Status: temp, serial, status, info, par_names, reset_dsp, reset_fpga
• Diagnostics: test [--plot], trace [--plot], histogram [--plot], echo, transceive
• Run Control: start, stop, mca [--plot], stats, preset, snapshot
• Spectrometer Control: tau, threshold, mca_width, mca_bins, polarity, parset, genset, filter_param, dac, base_gain, swgain, gain_trim, blfilter_avg_length
• Peripherals: i2c <read|write> <address> <command_bytes> [-d DATA] [-r READ_LEN]