pyvisa-rs

A PyVISA backend powered by rsvisa-rs, a Rust port of pyvisa-py. Select it from PyVISA with the @rs library spec.

Install

pip install pyvisa-rs

To build from a clone of this repo, with an activated virtualenv:

cd pyvisa-rs
maturin develop

This builds the Rust extension and installs the pyvisa-rs package into the current environment. PyVISA discovers it automatically via its pyvisa_* package scan.

Usage

import pyvisa

rm = pyvisa.ResourceManager("@rs")

print(rm.list_resources())

with rm.open_resource("TCPIP::192.168.1.10::INSTR") as instr:
    instr.timeout = 5000
    print(instr.query("*IDN?"))

That's it — once "@rs" is passed to ResourceManager, the rest of the PyVISA API works exactly as it does against any other backend.

Backends supported

The Rust backend mirrors pyvisa-py's transports:

• TCPIP::...::INSTR (VXI-11)
• TCPIP::...::SOCKET
• TCPIP::...::HISLIP
• USB::...::INSTR / USB::...::RAW
• ASRL...::INSTR (serial)

USB

USB uses libusb, which pyvisa-rs gets from its libusb-package dependency (the same libusb pyvisa-py's usb-full extra installs). Without that package, a system libusb is used instead.

As with pyvisa-py, on Windows each USB instrument needs a generic WinUSB driver, for example installed with Zadig. Instruments bound to a vendor USBTMC driver (NI-VISA, Keysight IO Libraries) aren't reachable through libusb.

Comparing against pyvisa-py

examples/discovery.py runs list_resources() through both backends and diffs the results:

uv run --with pyvisa --with pyserial --with pyusb \
       --with libusb-package --with zeroconf --with pyvisa-py \
       examples/discovery.py

Pass --reinstall-package pyvisa-rs after editing Rust sources — uv's wheel cache does not invalidate on Rust source changes.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. pyvisa-rs is built on a port of pyvisa-py (MIT License); see the LICENSE, LICENSE-pyvisa-py and NOTICE files shipped with this package.