Labgrid support for LXI‑based (or raw‑TCP SCPI) instrumentation

[ca-ja]

Hi,

Labgrid (LG) was deployed in our lab infrastructure by my colleagues @stoupa-cz and @Sabolik many years ago. It's a great tool, thanks for it.

Recently there is a growing need to use lab instruments via ethernet. In most cases, these are LXI-compatible instruments, or just SCPI-RAW(TCP).

As far as I know, LG has the following options for this case:

1. Sigrok: SigrokDriver @ SigrokDevice.
2. PyVISA: PyVISADriver @ PyVISADevice
3. or a custom straightforward driver using the NetworkSerialPort resource

Each of these options has its pros and cons.

Sigrok:
➕ already has drivers for a lot of instruments
➕ offers a lot of other instruments in addition to LG
➖ only USBTMC in LG, low integration with LG, need to finish
➖ more laborious driver preparation (need to implement driver both on sigrok side and probably finish on LG side)

PyVISA:
➕ covers most of the interfaces needed, including Ethernet
➕ robust, unifies access to most commonly used interfaces
➖ only partially integrated in LG (locally), no support in labgrid-client, need to be done

Custom driver:
➕ can be made minimalist/straightforward
➕ full control, easy customization
➖ duplicate element compared to PyVISA

Our first quick&dirty solution was based on NetworkSerialPort, for which some functionality was always implemented in the pytest fixtures. Now we want to consolidate this functionality in proper layer and so have a proper LG driver.

Which option do you recommend? How do you use LG in this case?

I personally prefer PyVISA at the moment. There are a few things to be completed, but compared to Sigrok there will be less work involved, even later when adding new drivers. What do you think about it?

Thank you in advance for the discussion.