InCtrl - Instruments Control Python API

InCtrl library provides high level API to common electronics bench instruments, such programmable power supplies, electronic loads, oscilloscopes and many more. Its intent is twofold. Provide API at such high level so as to minimize cognitive load on electrical and application engineers working and the lab making lab automation easy. And second, make it possible to write code that would use InCtrl library to be agnostic to instruments makes and model where possible, i.e. application engineers should be able to swap one equipment make for another and have their python scripts continue running without any change. To that end interation with the instruments happens using generic handlers to instrument types. For example, to interact with power supply user need to create an instance of PowerSupply class like so

from inctrl import power_supply, PowerSupply

ps: PowerSupply = power_supply("$ps_address", channel = 1)

Function power_supply(...) when called will discover make and mode of a particular power supply and return appropriate instance of PowerSupply. That could be RigolPowerSupply, KikusuiPowerSupply or what have you. User does not have to be concerned with make and model that power supply. This is of course true only up to a point. For example, you may need power supply that can supply 100 Watts and swapping one for another might not even though API would stay the same. To resolve this issue user can request specific capabilities that instantiating power supply my have. Details of that can be found in other pages.

InCtrl is written in pure python and distributed under MIT license. Its source code can be found at https://github.com/priimak/inctrl.