Software Instruments

Software instruments are not associated with a physical instrument and are defined entirely in software. The Clock is a simple example.

Adding instruments in `setup()`

Adding instruments in `.toml`

Creating new software instruments

Example: Random number generator

Add to Experiment

Measure random integers

Here we will run through the creation of an example software instrument (inheretting from SoftwareInstrument) -- a random number generator -- that illustrates how to implement your own instrument classes. The process for hardware instruments is the same except you need to inheret from the Instrument class.

Inheret from SoftwareInstrument and mark your query methods (methods that return values from your instrument) with the @mark_query decorator and command methods with the @mark_command decorator. We will write this into a new file named random_number_generator.py for import into this experiment and any others that may use it.

random_number_generator.py
from pyacquisition import SoftwareInstrument
import random

class RandomNumberGenerator(SoftwareInstrument):
    """ A software random number generator instrument
    """

    @mark_query
    def random_number() -> float:
        """ Generate a random float in [0, 1]
        """
        return random.random()

    @mark_query
    def random_integer(minimum: int, maximum: int) -> int:
        """Generate a random integer within a specified range.
        """
        return random.randint(minimum, maximum)

Notes

Type hints are mandatory. pyacquisition uses type hints for both data validation and the generation of appropriate GUI widgets and are therefore non-optional on all @mark_query and @mark_command methods.

Default values are optional, but preferred. Default values are not required, but are used to prepopulate the GUI widgets with default values. We suggest that sensible defaults are always provided to mitigate against undesired (erroneous/null) user inputs.

Docstrings are optional, but preferred. The docstring is not strictly requried but is used in the GUI as a helpful descriptive label if provided. We suggest that they are used.

Software Instruments