An Instrument Automation Package written in Python
My work at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab was centered around developing a compact and affordable type of linear accelerator (linac) called a MEQALAC. Our accelerator was part of a test stand which relied upon many different types of lab instruments to run the linac and collect data. This system originally used NI LabView to synchronize everything, however this became increasingly impractical to extend as new instruments and new functionality needed to be incorporated. Our team wasn’t satisfied with any of the instrument automation tools available at the time, so we decided to create our own Python package which we could use to simplify our test stand and extend to future projects.
The result was the hardware_control. Designed to provide reusable user interfaces and Python-based instrument drivers, control programs can be written as simply as connecting the your instrument’s driver to a UI. For example, if you had a Keysight 4000 series oscilloscope you wished to use for data collection, you’d connect the Keysight 4000 series Python driver to the generic oscilloscope UI, all provided by Hardware Control.
This project resulted in a completely new software system for our experiment which allowed us to collect data faster and more reliably, while also integrating the data collection process with our data analysis workflow. The project resulted in a publication in the Journal of Open Source Software, an academic journal designed to improve the quality of published software through peer review. It was also a very personally satisfying project to work on. Not only my first opportunity to professionally develop software full time in Python, but I have been able to use it personally at home; to this day, I still use Hardware Control to automate processes on my home lab bench!
If you’d like to give Hardware Control a try, you can get started by checking out its documentation, or jump right in by installing it through pip.