PyVISA-py 0.4.1

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 2.7, 3.4+)

• 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) - gpib-ctypes (to interface with GPIB instruments on Windows and Linux, warning: experimental)

Python 2 support

With Python 2 EOL behind us, and given the limited time maintainers have, the 0.4.0 release of PyVISA-py will be the last version of PyVISA-py supporting Python 2.

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>

• Matthieu Dartiailh <marul@laposte.net>

• 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)

0.4.1 (2020-05-27)

• fix typo in tcpip.py PR #233 (back-ported)

0.4.0 (2020-05-06)

• support device lan name in TCPIP INSTR resources PR #226

• fix handling of VXI11 flags in device_write PR #226

• do not enforce 4 bytes padding RFC 1014 since some instrument do not respect it (Issue # 225) PR #226

• fix not setting stop bits with serial devices PR #205

• fix improper wait time before a timeout in the TCPIP backend PR # 173

• add GPIB support for proprietary device drivers on Windows and Linux (experimental): try importing gpib-ctypes if linux-gpib is not present. fix #105 #137

• fix return types of PyVisaLibrary and Session methods to match pyvisa.highlevel.VisaLibraryBase fix #169 PR #170

• avoid double closing of gpib resources PR #171

• fix initialization of timeout for the USB resources (the default was set before creating the underlying connection to which the timeout must be passed and was not). PR #167

• implement USBTMC abort sequence after read timeout to avoid losing communication with the instrument after a timeout occurs. PR #179

• fix custom timeout for USB instruments. PR #179

• fix triggering for all protocols. PR #180

• add support for “quirky” devices made by Rigol. PR #186 PR #207

• add support for Visa flush operation. PR #208

• fix reading large amounts of data from some instruments when using VXI-11. PR #209

0.3.1 (2018-09-12)

• Fix initialization of timeout (issue identified in TCPIP resources) PR #160

0.3 (2018-09-05)

• Fix handling of seesion registration under Python 3.7 PR #155

• Add read_stb, assert_trigger, lock, unlock to highlevel PR #139

• Fix timeout handling in usb PR #144

• Add gpib_command and assert_trigger to GPIB PR # 136

• Handle ValueError in usb list fix #131 PR #132

• Fix reading on GPIB and implement clear and gpib_send_ifc PR #132

• Do not error when listing USB devices PR #126

• Fix an error in the handling of the termchar for TCPIP INSTR PR #126

• Make list_resources return an empty tuple instead of erroring PR #121

• Proper support for timeout in TCPIP INSTR sessions PR #120 #127 #130 #144

• Proper encoding of data before transfer for all backends PR #119

• Unify use of StatusCode PR #118

• Improve handling of sessions attrs PR #116

• TCPIP SOCKET timeout handling improvement PR #115

• Fix compatibility with pyserial 3.0 PR #112

• TCPIP SOCKET handler read should not block PR #107

• TCPIP error handling fixes PR #100

• Use repr() instead of str() to log RPC record PR #97

• Speed up large transfer over GPIB 2beb52a5bcea2dae32d4a9908dc19f7874bfc0b7

• Catch GPIB errors while enumerating devices 9fea9d5c40cc6c33ce1244c209e5e576a33abfc2

• Add a serial poll function to GPIB backend PR #67

• Handle timeout in USB TMC backend PR #64

• Make USB TMC backend faster by transferring multiple bytes PR #63

• Fix issue with encoding before data transfer PR #59 #

• Get Linux GPIB version PR #55

• Fix broken import in TCPIP sessions PR #51

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