Following a lot of smaller and larger improvements and additions, we have finally released Lab::Measurement 3.900 on CPAN. Highlights compared to the last "round version" include support for the Nanonis Tramea quantum transport measurement, the Zurich Instruments HDAWG arbitrary waveform generator, the Synktek MCL1-540 lock-in amplifier, the Bluefors dilution refrigerator temperature control, the American Magnetics AMI430 magnet power supply, as well as many improvements for Lakeshore temperature controllers.
In addition, version 3.900 now finally drops the unmaintained legacy code layers (Lab::Bus, Lab::Connection, Lab::Instrument, Lab::XPRESS) and focuses on the Moose-based Modern Perl interface alone. This should make maintenance easier in the future. Anyone who still needs the old interfaces for measurement scripts should install the distribution Lab::Measurement::Legacy, where the deprecated modules are archived.
libusb is a highly portable library providing generic access to USB devices. USB::LibUSB was newly written in 2017 to provide Perl bindings to the libusb-1.0 API. It replaces the deprecated module Device::USB, which targeted the older and incompatible libusb-0.1 API. This release of USB::LibUSB fixes a bug in the config descriptor data structure. Before the fix, only the first interface of a given configuration was represented. Now, the "interface" element of the config descriptor hash holds an array of interfaces,...
Good news: Our article Lab::Measurement?A portable and extensible framework for controlling lab equipment and conducting measurements was accepted for publication by Computer Physics Communications and is available for download! The Lab::Measurement software stack is a feature-rich solution for measurement automation and instrument control, which is both lightweight and highly portable to different operating systems. It is actively used by an increasing number of research groups, mostly for experiments in mesoscopic physics, but recently also in particle physics and quantum optics....
Today's news is that we have submitted a manuscript for publication, describing Lab::Measurement and with it our approach towards fast, flexible, and platform-independent measuring with Perl! The manuscript mainly focuses on the new, Moose-based class hierarchy. We have uploaded it to arXiv as well; here is the (for now) full bibliographic information of the preprint:
"Lab::Measurement - a portable and extensible framework for controlling lab equipment and conducting measurements"If you're using Lab::Measurement in your lab, and this results in some nice publication, then we'd be very grateful for a citation of our work - for now the preprint, and later hopefully the accepted version.
S. Reinhardt, C. Butschkow, S. Geissler, A. Dirnaichner, F. Olbrich, C. Lane, D. Schröer, and A. K. Hüttel
submitted for publication; arXiv:1804.03321 (PDF, BibTeX entry)
Lab::Measurement 3.620 was released yesterday. The most important addition is a new high-level sweep framework written with Moose. Check out the new tutorial Lab::Moose::Sweep::Tutorial! Comparing with the older Lab::XPRESS framework, the main new feature is support for block data. This is needed when working with instruments like spectrum analyzers or vector network analyzers which return an array of data in each measurement....
The Lab::Measurement module stack will be featured with a poster at Europe's largest physics conference this year, the DPG Frühjahrstagung (Spring Meeting) of the Condensed Matter Section, Berlin, march 11. - 16. 2018. So please come by on Monday, March 12, 2018, 15:00?19:00, Poster B, TT 29: Poster Session: Cryogenic Particle Detectors and Cyotechnique. If you cannot wait until march, please consider the Perl in the Physics Lab presentation at FOSDEM by Andreas K. Hüttel, my supervisor, next weekend!...
FOSDEM 2018, the "Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting", takes place 3-4 February at Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Campus Solbosch, Brussels - and our measurement control software Lab::Measurement will be presented there in the Perl devrooom! As all of FOSDEM, the talk will also be streamed live and archived; more details on this follow later. Here's the abstract:
Perl in the Physics Lab
Andreas K. Hüttel
Track: Perl Programming Languages devroom
Room: K.4.601
Day: Sunday
Start: 11:00
End: 11:40
Let's visit our university lab. We work on low-temperature nanophysics and transport spectroscopy, typically measuring current through experimental chip structures. That involves cooling and temperature control, dc voltage sources, multimeters, high-frequency sources, superconducting magnets, and a lot more fun equipment. A desktop computer controls the experiment and records and evaluates data.
Some people (like me) want to use Linux, some want to use Windows. Not everyone knows Perl, not everyone has equal programming skills, not everyone knows equally much about the measurement hardware. I'm going to present our solution for this, Lab::Measurement. We implement a layer structure of Perl modules, all the way from the hardware access and the implementation of device-specific command sets to high level measurement control with live plotting and metadata tracking. Current work focuses on a port of the entire stack to Moose, to simplify and improve the code.
The Lab::Measurement project provides Open Source control of Test & Measurement devices with Perl. This post introduces the new Test & Measurement back end modules Lab::VXI11 and USB::TMC. Both VXI-11 and USBTMC are open standards and are supported by most modern T & M devices. They were developed as alternatives to the legacy GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus). The main purpose of GPIB is to transfer text messages between the measurement PC and an automated measurement device, such as a...
With the release of Lab::Measurement 3.550 we've switched to Dist::Zilla as maintenance tool. If you're not involved in hacking Lab::Measurement, you should essentially not notice this change. However, for the authors of the package, Dist::Zilla makes it much easier to keep track of dependencies, prepare new releases, and eventually also improve and unify the documentation... At the side we've also fixed Issue 4 and Lab::Measurement should now work out of the box with recent Gnuplot on Windows again.
I've just uploaded Lab::Measurement 3.544 to CPAN. This is our first release containing support for Zurich Instruments equipment, in particular the ZI MFLI digital lock-in amplifier, via Simon's Lab::Zhinst package. Enjoy!
The Lab::Measurement project provides Open Source control of test & measurement devices with Perl. On our recent poster, which was presented at this year's DPG Spring Meeting of the Condensed Matter Section, we mainly discuss the high-level aspects of Lab::Measurement necessary to perform highly complex measurement tasks with simple scripts. Now, the topic of this post is the CPAN release of Lab::Zhinst, which provides a Perl5 interface to devices from Zurich Instruments, a vendor of fast digital lock-in amplifiers, phase-locked...
