philippjenke / pylablib-v0

Variety of Python code for using in lab environment (data acquisition, device communication, data analysis)

Overview

PyLabLib is a collection of code intended to simplify some of the coding tasks encountered in a physics laboratory.

This is the last version of the library in the current state. The new major version will see large changes in the interface and code organization, rendering almost all code using this version incompatible (the functionality is preserved, so the transition will be straightforward).

Some major parts include:

• Simpler loading and saving of data in text or binary files.
• Data tables with heterogeneous columns and more universal indexing (heavy overlap with pandas).
• Some data processing utilities: filtering, decimating, peak detection, FFT (mostly wrappers around NumPy and SciPy).
• Classes for device control (universal wrapper for pyVISA, pySerial and network backends).
• Classes for many specific devices (cameras, lasers, translation stages, etc).
• More user-friendly fitting interface.
• Multi-level dictionaries which are convenient for storing heterogeneous data and settings in human-readable format.
• A bunch more utilities dealing with file system (creating, moving and removing folders, zipping/unzipping, path normalization), network (simplified interface for client and server sockets), strings (serializing and de-serializing values), function introspection, and more.
• Additional tools for GUI generation and simpler multithreading built on top PyQt5 (still in development stage: not completely documented, code organization and interfaces can change in later versions).

The library is available on GitHub (https://github.com/AlexShkarin/pyLabLib-v0), and the documentation can be found at http://pylablib-v0.readthedocs.io/ .