PyVISA-py 0.6.3

Description

PyVISA started as wrapper for the IVI-VISA library and therefore you need to install a VISA library in your system (National Instruments, Keysight, etc). This works most of the time, for most people. But IVI-VISA implementations are proprietary libraries 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 3.6+)

• PyVISA 1.11+

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)

• psutil (to discover TCPIP devices across multiple interfaces)

• zeroconf (for HiSLIP and VICP devices discovery)

• pyvicp (to enable the Teledyne LeCroy proprietary VICP protocol)

Installation

Using pip:

$ pip install pyvisa-py

Documentation

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