Lab Instrument Automation with Python

Remote control and automation of test instruments helps you save time, minimize errors, and increase productivity. Streamline your lab’s workflow, and focus on what matters: research and development.

Here I'll show you how I optimize test and data collection from electronics lab instrumentation, using Python libraries from low-level basic access to the psytestbench instrument driver library I've been building and using internally.

The testbench/instrumentation library is now open-sourced, released under the GPL and available at https://github.com/psychogenic/psytes...

It includes some documentation and many of examples. This library allows for code completion and a unified interface and support a few families of different instruments including oscilloscopes, signal generators, power supplies and multimeters. And thanks to VISA/pyVISA, SCPI, and the existing codebase, adding support for new instruments is very straightforward.

Realized I forgot to show that there's a good deal of documentation in the code itself, so with an object, say, "dso" you can just do
help(dso)
or
help(dso.channel1)
etc should give you some good clues as to what's available as well as show all the methods and params.

I did a short "live" demo, and discussed the circuit tested here in greater depth, on the last ‪@TheMakerCast‬ which also featured some cool robot action, tech talk and even a quiz--you can see here:
   • Makercast - Episode 48  

Links of interest:
pyvisa: https://pyvisa.readthedocs.io/en/late...
easy-scpi: https://pypi.org/project/easy-scpi/
psytestbench: https://github.com/psychogenic/psytes...
makercast:    / @themakercast