Python in the Lab

I have released version 0.6 of Pint, a Python units library. Pint is Python package to define, operate and manipulate physical quantities: the product of a numerical value and a unit of measurement. It allows arithmetic operations between them and conversions from and to different units. It provides a comprehensive and extensive list of physical units, prefixes and constants defined in a standalone text file. The registry can parse prefixed and pluralized forms of units resulting in a much shorter and maintainable unit definition list. It also provides great NumPy integration without monkey patching or importing a particular module, with implicit unit conversion and an emphasis on correctness. What's new The largest change landed in the way Pint handles offset units such as temperatures. It now provides a much better behavior that is both correct and useful. It deals properly with differences of temperatures, providing useful error messages when the requested operat...

PyVISA is a Python frontend for the VISA library that enables controlling all kinds of measurement equipment through GPIB, RS232, USB and Ethernet among others interfaces. If you are following the development of PyVISA you might have seen that we have recently made the visa module executable to provide a few useful utilities. To try this, you need to update to the latest PyVISA: $ pip install -U https://github.com/hgrecco/pyvisa/zipball/master First, we now provide a simpler way to get debug information: $ python -m visa info Machine Details:    Platform ID:    Darwin-10.8.0-x86_64-i386-32bit    Processor:      i386 Python:    Implementation: CPython    Executable:     /Users/grecco/envs/lantz/bin/python    Version:        3.2.3    Compiler:       GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)  ...

PyVISA is a Python frontend for the VISA library that enables controlling all kinds of measurement equipment through GPIB, RS232, USB and Ethernet among others interfaces. Starting form version 1.6 , PyVISA allows to use different backends. The cool thing is that your code remains the same, except the line in which you instantiate the resource manager (which tells which backend to use). A few days ago I blogged about one of such alternative backends called PyVISA-sim which allows your to mock the presence of instruments (in cased that you missed the announcement, is here ). Today I am making public a second backend.   Until now, talking to instruments via PyVISA required that you had National Instruments VISA library installed 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. It is an implementation of message based communication (Serial/USB/Ethernet) using...

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 sometimes you need to test PyVISA without the devices or even without VISA. Starting form version 1.6 , PyVISA allows to use different backends. These backends can be dynamically loaded. PyVISA-sim is one of such backends. It implements most of the methods for Message Based communication (Serial/USB/GPIB/Ethernet) in a simulated environment . The behavior of simulated devices can be controlled by a simple configuration in plain text . In the near future, you will be able to load this from file to change it depending on your needs. To test it you need to install PyVISA 1.6 which is currently only available from GitHub: $ pip install -U https://github.com/hgrecco/pyvisa/zipball/master And then install: $ pip install -U https://github.com/hgrecco/pyvisa-sim/zipball/master     For...

PyVISA is a Python frontend for the VISA library that enables controlling all kinds of measurement equipment through GPIB, RS232, USB, Ethernet among others interfaces. PyVISA 1.6 release is close and it brings several new nice things. One of the most visible improvements is the addition of a comprehensive set of resources classes , each mapping to a one of the 13 types of resources. Each class implements the methods and attributes that the specific session can handle, providing a Pythonic way to interact with the device (See here ). This has allowed us to implement higher level functions such as the group execute trigger in the GPIB Interface. PyVISA 1.6 brings a much better way to query a device for values , providing a comprehensive API to convert back and from ASCII and binary blocks. An API to write values to a device has been added (See here ). PyVISA 1.6 is thread-safe . While the VISA library has always been thread-safe, PyVISA was not. We have refactored the code r...

PyVISA is a Python wrapper for the VISA library that enables controlling all kinds of measurement equipment through GPIB, RS232, USB and Ethernet. It has served the instrumentation community very well since 2005 (that's Python 2.3!) and still does. However, Python and the different supported platforms have changed a lot in the recent years. We thought that PyVISA could use an update. Within the Lantz Project we did a small proof of principle of such update in visalib . Now we are taking what worked well and use it into PyVISA 1.5 (without changing the API!). In other words, PyVISA 1.5 brings several important changes in the underlying architecture without forcing you to change the programs . Some time ago I posted that we were going beta. Now PyVISA 1.5 is finally released. The new architecture is summarized here and the comparison with the previous one is here . Briefly you get Python 3 support , Mac OS X support , a better way to find libraries in your platform , a...

Today I have released version 0.5 of Pint, a Python units library. Pint is Python package to define, operate and manipulate physical quantities: the product of a numerical value and a unit of measurement. It allows arithmetic operations between them and conversions from and to different units. It provides a comprehensive and extensive list of physical units, prefixes and constants defined in a standalone text file. The registry can parse prefixed and pluralized forms of units resulting in a much shorter and maintainable unit definition list. It also provides great NumPy integration, with implicit unit conversion and an emphasis on correctness. What's new Pint 0.5 brings a long awaited feature: the integration with uncertainties , a great package by Eric Lebigot. Pint Measurement Class is now built using uncertainties ufloat class. The integration will be complete in 0.6 when we add support for all math operations. By the way, the integration of uncertainties in Pint is ...

PyVISA is a Python wrapper for the VISA library that enables controlling control all kinds of measurement equipment through GPIB, RS232, USB and Ethernet. It has served the instrumentation community very well since 2005 (that's Python 2.3!) and still does. However, Python and the different supported platforms have changed a lot in the recent years. We think that PyVISA can use an update. Within the Lantz Project we did a small proof of principle of such update in visalib . Now we are taking what worked well and use it into PyVISA 1.5 (without changing the API!). In other words, PyVISA 1.5 brings several important changes in the underlying architecture without forcing you to change the programs. The new architecture is summarized here and the comparison with the previous one is here . Briefly you get Python 3 support , Mac OS X support , a better way to find libraries in your platform , an isolated ctypes wrapper. But the most important change is that the VISA library is not op...