What is this repository for?

The goal is to provide reusable code for hardware control using python and Qt.

Documentation can be found at Read the Docs.

A web monitor (pip install hardware-control[server], then hc-web) shows the state, plots and alarms of your experiments in a browser, from anywhere. See the "Web monitor" page of the documentation.

How do I get set up?

The easiest way is to pip install the software:

pip install hardware-control

Examples

If you want to have a quick look at some basic functionality, you can run the demos in the example directory. If you have the same hardware that is used in the example, you will have to update the connection address, e.g. ip address. Otherwise, you can still run the examples by providing the --dummy command line argument that will simulate instrument output. The logging level can also be redirected to the terminal using --console and the log-level changed by providing --info or --debug options on the command line.

Tests

We use pytest to provide some simple tests for some of the functionallity of the package. However, to check if an instrument is really working, one needs to have the instrument connected, which makes testing harder. When the instruments are not available some functionallity, such as the Qt layout, can still be tested using "--dummy" mode. In this mode instrument parameters can return a predefined value or the result of a function.

To run the tests use:

python -m pytest

Contribution guidelines

Feel free to contribute new drivers for hardware or other changes.

We use ruff to format the code, so please format your code accordingly. The easiest way to achieve this is to install pre-commit and use the config file we provide:

pip install pre-commit
# cd into repo
pre-commit install

How to cite this package

Please use the following citation.

@article{Giesbrecht2022,
  doi = {10.21105/joss.02688},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02688},
  year = {2022},
  publisher = {The Open Journal},
  volume = {7},
  number = {72},
  pages = {2688},
  author = {Grant Giesbrecht and Ariel Amsellem and Timo Bauer and Brian Mak and Brian Wynne and Zhihao Qin and Arun Persaud},
  title = {Hardware-Control: Instrument control and automation package},
  journal = {Journal of Open Source Software}
}

Who do I talk to?

If you have questions, please contact Arun at apersaud@lbl.gov.

Copyright and License

See the files COPYRIGHT and LICENSE in the top level directory