PyVISA-py 0.2

Description

PyVISA started as wrapper for the NI-VISA library and therefore you need to install National Instruments VISA library in your system. This works most of the time, for most people. But NI-VISA is a proprietary library that only works on certain systems. That is when PyVISA-py jumps in.

Starting from version 1.6, PyVISA allows to use different backends. These backends can be dynamically loaded. PyVISA-py is one of such backends. It implements most of the methods for Message Based communication (Serial/USB/GPIB/Ethernet) using Python and some well developed, easy to deploy and cross platform libraries

VISA and Python

Python has a couple of features that make it very interesting for measurement controlling:

• Python is an easy-to-learn scripting language with short development cycles.

• It represents a high abstraction level, which perfectly blends with the abstraction level of measurement programs.

• It has a very rich set of native libraries, including numerical and plotting modules for data analysis and visualisation.

• A large set of books (in many languages) and on-line publications is available.

Requirements

• Python (tested with 2.6 and 2.7, 3.2+)

• PyVISA 1.6+

Optionally - PySerial (to interface with Serial instruments) - PyUSB (to interface with USB instruments) - linux-gpib (to interface with gpib instruments, only on linux)

Installation

Using pip:

$ pip install pyvisa-py

Documentation

The documentation can be read online at https://pyvisa-py.readthedocs.org

pyvisa-py is written and maintained by Hernan E. Grecco <hernan.grecco@gmail.com>.

Other contributors, listed alphabetically, are:

• Alex Forencich <alex@alexforencich.com>

• Alexander Bessman <bessman@kth.se>

• Colin Marquardt <github@marquardt-home.de>

• Lance McCulley <lancemcculley@gmail.com>

• Martin Ritter <ritter@mpp.mpg.de>

• Sebastian Held <sebastian.held@imst.de>

• Thomas Kopp <20.kopp@gmail.com>

• Thorsten Liebig <liebig@imst.de>

• Tobias Müller <Tobias_Mueller@twam.info>

(If you think that your name belongs here, please let the maintainer know)

0.2 (2015-08-25)

• Added support for TCPIP Socket. (Issue #38, thanks Thorsten Liebig)

• Added support for GPIB INSTR using linux-gpib. (Issue #24, thanks bessman)

• Added support for USB RAW. (Issue #18, kopp)

• Better error reporting when pyusb or pyserial is missing.

• Fixed logging of unicode strings. (Issue #54)

• Fixed timeout in SerialSession. (Issue #44)

• Moved resource name parsing to PyVISA.

• VXI11 protocol performance enhancement. (thanks alexforencich)

• Improved pyusb importing.

• Fixed large binary reads in TCPIP.

• Added backend information to logger.

• Use pyvisa compat/struct.py for python < 2.7.8 (thanks Martin Ritter)

0.1 (2015-02-08)

• Initial release. Preliminary support for: - USB INSTR - TCPIP INSTR - ASRL INSTR