LibVXI11

Description

• lightweight VXI11 instrument control from Julia
• tiny ccall wrapper around libvxi11.so
• (intentionally) no higher-level layers such as NI VISA

Redistribution and licensing

The provided code and license covers only the LibVXI11.jl wrapper, not the shared library libvxi11.so, which is licensed under its own mix of GNU GPLv2 and a special license for the .x RPC source file.

Installation

julia> using Pkg

julia> Pkg.add(path="https://github.com/eltvor/LibVXI11.jl")

Usage

dev = vxi_open_device("192.168.0.10") # or vxi_open_device("192.168.0.10", device="gpib,1") if device name differs from "instr0"
vxi_send(dev, "*idn?")
vxi_receive_s(dev)
vxi_close_device(dev, "192.168.0.10")

• vxi_send takes either String or byte vector
• vxi_receive can output either to a pre-allocated buffer, or allocate one a temporary buffer (optionally provide max_len if 256 is not enough)
• vxi_receive_s is a convenience call returning String

TODO

• add binary dependency build
• change the device handle to a Julia struct holding server address, allowing for a simpler vxi_close_device(dev) call
• support (optional) timeouted calls
• benchmark against Keno/VXI11.jl
• if you wish to test the whole functionality, a dummy RPC server shall be run to perform queries -- unsure if it is worth doing so, as this wrapper does not actually implement anything than ccalling the lib

ChangeLog

• ported to Julia-1.0 on the request of Jakub Ladman, tested with Julia-1.8, bugfixes (Ptr{} -> Ref{}) (Feb 2023)
• initial working versions, Julia-0.4.6 and Julia-0.6.4 (Jan 2019)

Heritage and results

• written ~2019 to support huge data dumps from HP/Agilent/Keysight Infiniium oscilloscopes on the floor of the European Space Agency, as well as during 2020 COMPASS tokamak plasma inteferometer design and experiment
• mid-age Infiniium 50Gsps oscilloscope --> ThinkPad T420s transfer over 1000BaseTx and TCP yielded some net rate of ~320Mbps (no jumbo buffers in place, WinXP running on the oscilloscope)

Credits

• Steve D. Sharples (author of the libvxi11.so)
  • Applied Optics Group, Nottingham http://optics.eee.nottingham.ac.uk/
• Jakub Ladman (inspiring me to publish and initial 2nd user)

See also

• the original libvxi11 library we call, and its homepage
• different projects with similar goal:
  • Keno/VXI11.jl - pure Julia implementation of the VXI11's RPC. Seems to lack the RPC-portmapper, so the instrument name to TCP port resolution is not possible
  • Instruments.jl