tomato-picovna

tomato driver for Pico Technologies PicoVNA network analysers.

This driver is a wrapper around the PicoVNA 5 SDK. As such, the driver needs to be supplied with a location of the various libraries within the SDK using the settings file of tomato.

Installation

Linux:

1. Download and install the PicoVNA 5 software for Linux or Raspberry Pi.
2. Download the vna.py file and save it in the lib folder within the PicoVNA 5 installation directory, by default /opt/picovna/lib.
3. Pass the location of the lib folder within the installation directory (e.g. /opt/picovna/lib) as settings.dllpath to the driver.

Windows:

1. Download and install the PicoVNA 5 software for Windows.
2. Download the picovna wheel and extract it.
3. Pass the location of the extracted picovna folder as settings.dllpath to the driver.

Supported functions

Capabilities

• linear_sweep for performing a sweep of the reflection coefficient using linearly spaced points

Attributes

• temperature, the temperature of the PicoVNA device, RO, float
• bandwidth, the filter bandwidth for the sweep in Hz, RW, float
• power_level, the power amplitude of the sweep in dBm, RW, float
• sweep_params, a Sweep defining the acquisition parameters, containing the following attributes:
  • start: low frequency of the sweep, in Hz, RW, Quantity
  • stop: high frequency of the sweep, in Hz, RW, Quantity
  • points: number of points, RW, int ∈ POINTS_SET
  • step: point step size in Hz, RW, Quantity Note that either points or step can be supplied, not both.
• sweep_nports, the number of ports to be swept, selecting a reflection (= 1) or transmission (= 2) experiment, RW, int
• calibration, the path to the calibration file to be loaded before acquisition, RW, str

Contributors

• Peter Kraus