Lantz 0.3 is out: better PyVISA support, leaner drivers, great GUI building blocks

Lantz is a Python automation and instrumentation toolkit that allows you to control scientific instruments in a clean and efficient manner writing pure Python code.

After waiting for a long time, Lantz 0.3 is out. It took a while, but it was for a good reason: we were toying, playing and testing with new ideas to make Lantz better. I am going to go quickly over some of them.

MessageBasedDriver: a class to rule them all

MessageBasedDriver  replaces all previous Driver classes for message based instruments. It leverages the power of PyVISA to talk over many different interfaces. But remember that this does not mean that you require NI-VISA installed. You can still talk via the pyvisa-py backend which uses PySerial / PyUSB / Python Standard library. You can also use the pyvisa-sim backend to simulate devices!


Great GUI applications

Lantz provides two classes to help you build applications: Backend and Frontend. The first contains the logic of your application and the second the GUI. This keeps things easier to test and develop. It also allows you to call you application without a GUI (for example from the command line) or with a different GUI (for example a debug GUI with more information).

See for example here


App Building Blocks

Common structures such as looping or scanning are provided as blocks. These are combinations of Backend and Frontend that can be composed within your application. This enables rapid development of responsive, multithreaded applications.

Some of the blocks are showcased here

I will blog about this things in future posts. But in the meantime, you should really look at the docs.

Project documentation: ReadTheDocs

Public source code repository: GitHub


But the most important piece of news is not technical but social. Triggered by his contribution to Pint, MatthieuDartiailh and I have decided to work together. He has done some awesome instrumentation related coding in eapii and HQCMeas. We will work together to put the best of them into Lantz. Thanks to this collaboration, I have no doubt that Lantz 0.4 will be even better than 0.3

I have always felt that dividing the community among many projects is a waste of time and energy. That is why this is more than just than a technical merge. This is the birth of a python instrumentation initiative that we have called LabPy. We have created an organization in github to host Lantz and other projects with a common goal: making instrumentation better in Python. Join us!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Communicating with instruments using PyVISA but without NI-VISA

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...
Read more

Running Python code in a LaTeX document

Image
I am currently working on a LaTeX document in which the content is still in a very fluid phase and  the figures change often. I usually have a Python script that prepares the figures and saves them as PDFs. To iterate faster, I wanted to insert Python code directly into LaTeX, executing the code when the document is compiled. Googling around I found that I was not the first one to want this. There is this LaTeX package with this github repo . The package provides a new environment ( python ) within which you can write arbitrary Python code. The code is executed when the document is compiled and the output is inserted into the document. I try it and it worked like a charm. It was even printing the traceback in red when there was an error in the script. You can do things like this: \documentclass[a4paper]{book} \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} \usepackage{python} \begin{document} A simple example: \begin{python} print(2+3) \end{python} \vspace{1cm} Generating and displaying...
Read more

PyVISA-sim. Test your PyVISA applications without connected instruments

I have just released PyVISA-sim 0.1.  PyVISA-sim is a backend for  PyVISA . It allows you to simulate devices and therefore test your applications without having real instruments connected. While there still a lot of features to add, this early release already allows you to: - play around with a simulated device. - write your own simulated  device  in YAML files.  - simulated  devices can include commands and properties which are automatically generated from the YAML file. - Properties can have some basic validation rules. Install it using:     pip install -U pyvisa-sim Code:  https://github.com/ hgrecco/pyvisa-sim Docs:  http://pyvisa-sim. readthedocs.org/ Tracker:  https://github.com/ hgrecco/pyvisa-sim/issues
Read more