Drivers

Instrumental drivers allow you to control and read data from various hardware devices.

Some devices (e.g. Thorlabs cameras) have drivers that act as wrappers to their drivers’ C bindings, using ctypes or cffi. Others (e.g. Tektronix scopes and AFGs) utilize VISA and PyVISA, its Python wrapper. PyVISA requires a local installation of the VISA library (e.g. NI-VISA) to interface with connected devices.

• Cameras
  • PCO Cameras
  • PCO Pixelfly Cameras
  • Thorlabs TSI Cameras
  • UC480 (Thorlabs DCx) Cameras
  • Photometrics Cameras
• DAQs
  • NI DAQs
• Function Generators
  • Tektronix Function Generators
• Lasers
  • Toptica FemtoFErb 1560 Laser
• Lock-in Amplifiers
  • SRS Model SR850 Lock-in Amplifier
• Motion Control
  • Thorlabs Motorized Filter Flip Mount (MFF10X)
  • Thorlabs K10CR1 Rotation Stage
  • T-Cube DC Servo Motor Controller (TDC001)
  • Attocube ECC100 Motion Controller
• Multimeters
  • HP 34401A Multimeter
• Power Meters
  • Newport Power Meters
  • Thorlabs Power Meters
• Scopes
  • Tektronix Oscilloscopes
• Spectrometers
  • Bristol Spectrum Analyzers
  • Thorlabs CCS Spectrometers
• Wavemeters
  • Burleigh Wavemeters

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Functions

class instrumental.drivers.Instrument

Base class for all instruments.

save_instrument(name, force=False)

Save an entry for this instrument in the config file.

Parameters:

• name (str) – The name to give the instrument, e.g. ‘myCam’
• force (bool, optional) – Force overwrite of the old entry for instrument name. By default, Instrumental will raise an exception if you try to write to a name that’s already taken. If force is True, the old entry will be commented out (with a warning given) and a new entry will be written.

instrumental.drivers.instrument(inst=None, **kwargs)

Create any Instrumental instrument object from an alias, parameters, or an existing instrument.

>>> inst1 = instrument('MYAFG')
>>> inst2 = instrument(visa_address='TCPIP::192.168.1.34::INSTR')
>>> inst3 = instrument({'visa_address': 'TCPIP:192.168.1.35::INSTR'})
>>> inst4 = instrument(inst1)

instrumental.drivers.list_instruments(server=None, module=None, blacklist=None)

Returns a list of info about available instruments.

May take a few seconds because it must poll hardware devices.

It actually returns a list of specialized dict objects that contain parameters needed to create an instance of the given instrument. You can then get the actual instrument by passing the dict to instrument().

>>> inst_list = get_instruments()
>>> print(inst_list)
[<NIDAQ 'Dev1'>, <TEKTRONIX 'TDS 3032'>, <TEKTRONIX 'AFG3021B'>]
>>> inst = instrument(inst_list[0])

Parameters:

• server (str, optional) – The remote Instrumental server to query. It can be an alias from your instrumental.conf file, or a str of the form (hostname|ip-address)[:port], e.g. ‘192.168.1.10:12345’. Is None by default, meaning search on the local machine.
• blacklist (list or str, optional) – A str or list of strs indicating driver modules which should not be queried for instruments. Strings should be in the format 'subpackage.module', e.g. 'cameras.pco'. This is useful for very slow-loading drivers whose instruments no longer need to be listed (but may still be in use otherwise). This can be set permanently in your instrumental.conf.
• module (str, optional) – A str to filter what driver modules are checked. A driver module gets checked only if it contains the substring module in its full name. The full name includes both the driver group and the module, e.g. 'cameras.pco'.

instrumental.drivers.list_visa_instruments()

Returns a list of info about available VISA instruments.

May take a few seconds because it must poll the network.

It actually returns a list of specialized dict objects that contain parameters needed to create an instance of the given instrument. You can then get the actual instrument by passing the dict to instrument().

>>> inst_list = get_visa_instruments()
>>> print(inst_list)
[<TEKTRONIX 'TDS 3032'>, <TEKTRONIX 'AFG3021B'>]
>>> inst = instrument(inst_list[0])

Example

>>> from instrumental import instrument
>>> scope = instrument('my_scope_alias')
>>> x, y = scope.get_data()

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