[time-nuts] controlling instruments using USB

Thomas Valerio tjv at westwood-tech.com
Mon Jul 25 22:11:52 EDT 2016


Have you looked at alien to convert the rpm to a deb?

   https://www.google.com/#q=alien+package+conversion


> Semi-off-topic..
>
> I've got a bunch of Keysight/Agilent/HP instruments with USB interfaces
> that I want to control from Python.  On Mac and PC, the PyVisa library
> works great (either the one with the NI back end or the python only back
> end )
>
> But, on Ubuntu, there's no way to install the NI drivers (RH install
> only, and Ubuntu is debian..)
>
> So, I've been doing usbtmc, which sort of works.  (after figuring out
> all the udev rules stuff)
>
> If I do something like this from the python interpreter:
>
>  >>> import usbtmc
>  >>> myinst = usbtmc.Instrument( mfr, product)
>  >>> myinst.write('some command')
>
> it works fine.
>
> But if I put the same three linesin a .py file and run it, it doesn't
> always work.. sometimes, you need to send the command twice.
>
> It seems it might be a timing thing (in libusb or usbtmc?) but putting
> some sleep() in between connecting to the instrument and doing the write
> doesn't seem to work all the time.
>
> Very curious.
>
> Any ideas?
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