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) - gpib-ctypes (to interface with GPIB instruments on Windows and Linux, warning: experimental)

With Python 2 EOL behind us, and given the limited time maintainers have, the 0.4.0 release of PyVISA-py 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