Hardware-Control: Instrument control and automation package.

Hardware-Control is a Python package for instrument control and automation. It provides reusable user interfaces and instrument drivers to simplify writing control programs. Hardware -Control uses PyQt5, a GUI framework (Riverbank Computing Limited, 2020), to create fast and efficient user interfaces compatible with most major operating systems. Hardware-Control is also designed so that new drivers can be easily added for new hardware and used with existing user interfaces. The package also provides means for simplifying data collection with automatic data logging, plotting, and several export formats. Hardware-Control was designed with the use case of experiments in our laboratory in mind. Normally, this involves reading and setting voltages, controlling power supplies and oscilloscopes, updating values on external triggers, and automatically updating these values on a timer with time scales of about a second. The program is currently not well-fitted to do any real-time or near real-time communications with instruments or to handle data that is, for example, being streamed from a camera. The program interacts best with message-based devices or devices that already have Python’s modules available to control them. The program’s instrument drivers can send messages to sockets, usb ports, serial ports, etc. or call a Python function to read or write a setting or call a command on the interface. Most of the drivers rely on the excellent PyVISA (PyVISA Authors, 2021) library, but drivers can also utilize PyModbus (Pymodbus Authors, 2021), or the built-in socket library.