spcm-dds-control

A Graphical User Interface (GUI) for controlling Direct-Digital-Synthesis (DDS) functionality of the Arbitrary Waveform Generators (AWG) and DDS cards of Spectrum Instrumentation.

Supported devices

See the SUPPORTED_DEVICES.md file for a list of supported devices.

Requirements

spcm-dds-control requires the Spectrum Instrumentation driver which is available for Windows and Linux. Please have a look in the manual of your product for more information about installing the driver on the different plattforms.

Installation and dependencies

Download and install Python

Start by installing Python 3.9 or higher.

Create a virtual environment

In the main folder, the folder in which this README recides, create a virtual environment:

Under Linux or GitBash (Windows):

$ python -m venv .venv

activate the virtual environment and install all the required packages:

$ source .venv/Scripts/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

you're all setup to run the program!

Running the program

In the virtual environement, execute the following command to start the GUI program:

$ python main.py

You should see the GUI window appear.

Demo devices

To test the Spectrum Instrumentation API with user code without hardware, the Control Center gives the user the option to create demo devices. These demo devices can be used in the same manner as real devices. Simply change the device identifier string to the string as shown in the Control Center.

Development

Creating the resources file

To create the resource file for Python use the following command:

$ pyrcc5 SpcDDSControl.qrc -o resources.py

Documentation

Please see the hardware user manual of your specific card for more information about the available functionality.