PyVISA-py
A PyVISA backend that implements a large part of the "Virtual Instrument Software Architecture" (VISA) in pure Python (with the help of some nice cross platform libraries python packages!).
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)
Python 2 support
Python 2 EOL is now near (January 1st 2020), and given the limited time maintainers have, the next release of PyVISA-py (0.4) to be released around July 2019 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