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Hardware Instruments

Hardware instruments

Hardware instruments are associated with a physical instrument. pyacquisition has implemented classes for a number of common instruments. Interfacting with these instruments is as simple as adding them to your experiment either within the setup() method or via a .toml configuration file.

Add to experiment in setup()

Add to experiment in .toml

Add measurement

Creating new instruments

The list of instrument classes implemented in pyacquisition is far from exhaustive. It is anticipated that you will need to write your own class that harnesses the functionality of your instrument.

The process is simple. An outline of the workflow is as follows:

  1. Compose your instrument inhereting from Instrument or SoftwareInstrument
  2. Mark your public methods with either @mark_command or @mark_query
  3. Add the instrument in the setup() method of your experiment

Create an instrument class

For the purpose of this example, we will show a minimal implementation of a class that interfaces with a Stanford Research Systems SR830 lock-in amplifier. A complete class is present within pyacqusition.

SR_830.py
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from pyacquisition import Instrument


class SR_830(Instrument):


    def measure_x():
        pass


    def measure_y():
        pass

Add instrument to Experiment

User-created instruments can only be added to an experiment within the setup() method of a custom defined experiment class.

Measure voltages (X and Y)