Driver machinery

I3py strives to provide a convenient but flexible interface to write drivers that can handle the full complexity of the instrument you need to interface. Of course this has some cost in term of internal complexity, but those are believed to be worth it.

This section of the documentation will first take you through the notions used in I3py to structure your driver, and how to use them to write your driver. It will try to remain generic but will use the case of instruments controlled through the VISA protocol to illustrate the examples as it is a very common case.

Once this done, the following sections will dive in the detailed working of the different components making up a driver, and will explore in more details some of the notions previously presented. The reading of those sections is not mandatory to write a driver but will help you understand the inner working of I3py and help you tackle more challenging driver designs.

• 1. Writing a driver
  • 1.1. General organization
  • 1.2. Creating the driver
  • 1.3. Adding a Feature
  • 1.4. Adding an Action
  • 1.5. Using subsystem and channels
  • 1.6. Handling options
  • 1.7. Special class variables for VISA based driver
  • 1.8. Making the driver accessible from the top level manufacturer package
• 2. Features
  • 2.1. Working principle
  • 2.2. Usual configurations
  • 2.3. Flexible getter/setter
• 3. Actions
  • 3.1. Working principle
  • 3.2. Usual configurations
• 4. Subsystems and channels
  • 4.1. Subsystems
  • 4.2. Channels
• 5. Advanced customization
  • 5.1. Defining custom handler
  • 5.2. Composing custom behavior and existing ones
• 6. Standards