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!).
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
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.
- 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 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.
Using pip:
$ pip install pyvisa-py
The documentation can be read online at https://pyvisa-py.readthedocs.org