Introduction to Instrument Control Using Python

This book briefly describes the hardware protocol and software interfaces that a modern IVI-specification-compatible instrument device should offer, and gives out guidelines about interfacing these devices with python programming language using examples.

Stack Structure

Modern experimental instrument devices uses GPIB/USB/LAN as hardware interfaces to talk with controllers (eg. Laboratory computers), utilizing the use of protocols such as USBTMC on USB interface and VXI-11 on LAN interface, providing a command-respond-event model of operating devices. Most of the devices define their operating commands with compliance to the Standard Commands for Programmable Instrumentation (SCPI) specifications.

Instrument vendors, software providers and open source community have built a large number of software stacks to help interfacing with instruments, most of these stacks are compliant to the Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA) standards. Implementing the Interchangeable Virtual Instruments (IVI) standards, some of these stacks can even provide high abstraction at the level of object-oriented programming.

All these protocols, standards and specifications are maintained by the IVI foundation. This part will describe the logical structure of these hardware and software stacks, especially on the python stack which we'll be using.

Installation and deployment

The python stack for interfacing instruments including packages such as PyVISA, python-ivi, python-vxi, python-usbtmc, python-gpib. Some of these packages require external and native components which are platform-specific.

This part would provide guidelines for install and deploy these software stacks to production environments on various platforms.

Instrument control

Using the PyVISA and related python packages, direct command control to the instrument devices could be implemented, which is an approach that would work flawlessly with all compatible instruments.

Utilizing the python-ivi library and a proper ivi driver, object-oriented programming level interfacing could be achieved.

This part would give concrete examples on how to interface instruments using the two different approaches mentioned above.

Python Version

Principally, both python 2 and python 3 could be used in the stack, as all the packages involved in this book is 2 and 3 compatible.

Due to most binary python distributions on Windows platform are python 2 distributions, this book would cover its code in python 2 syntaxes.