ERASynth drivers

[caenrigen]

Hi!

This is a driver using the new style implemented in microsoft/Qcodes#3098.

• I still need to add an example notebook.

For now I have a question, what is the proper way of making sure a certain command for a parameter was received by an instrument?

For this particular instrument I implemented the driver with manual control over the serial communication (instead of a Visa instrument) because from experience it was very unreliable in setting the parameters and some experiments require to as fast as possible and at the same time to be 100% sure that a certain parameter has been already set to the desired value.

To deal with this issue this driver always reads back the value it sets and sets it again until it succeeds... not very elegant nor ideal but at least makes it reliable.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

---

PS The link to the docs of this repo is a bit hidden on the top, and I think most people will be looking for it in the README. I suggest in the PR to have it there as well.

[FarBo]

@caenrigen

Thank you for the driver. Regarding your question, I think you should use ask_raw method in the Instrument class. This method writes a command to the instrument and returns a response.
You should override this method since you are defining a new hardware communication.

I don't have a personal experience myself to guide you in detail, but I wanted to give you some insight.
You could have a look at qcodes drivers, where some of them have used ask_raw, for instance this one:
https://github.com/QCoDeS/Qcodes/blob/master/qcodes/instrument_drivers/Harvard/Decadac.py

Then you could probably use ask_raw to make your parameters set values reliable.

[FarBo]

@caenrigen
We had a fix for doc building in the respoitory files, so I merged the master branch to have that fix for this PR. CI should not complain about that error anymore. But we have other problems that CI complains about. Let me know if I could help fixing those?

[caenrigen]

@caenrigen
We had a fix for doc building in the respoitory files, so I merged the master branch to have that fix for this PR. CI should not complain about that error anymore. But we have other problems that CI complains about. Let me know if I could help fixing those?

Thank you @FarBo

The rest of the errors depend on microsoft/Qcodes#3098 being merged.

[caenrigen]

@FarBo @astafan8 This one should also be ready for review now :)

[caenrigen]

@FarBo @astafan8 I have updated this PR to make use of the latest qcodes and the new feature for documenting parameters.

Could you have a look and merge it?

If possible would appreciate if we can have a new release as well in order to be able to ship this new driver to PyPi

@AdriaanRol @dcrielaard

[caenrigen]

@astafan8 thank you for the quick review, feel free to merge :)

[FarBo]

@caenrigen
Could you check the CI errors?
Seems mypy is not happy about bunch of lines in the code. Let me know if I could help passing it :)

[caenrigen]

@caenrigen
Could you check the CI errors?
Seems mypy is not happy about bunch of lines in the code. Let me know if I could help passing it :)

Hi! Just checked and tried to fix some of them :)

Please give me a hand if it does not pass again 😇

Kind regards,
Victor

[caenrigen]

@FarBo I hope my last commit solves most issues

[FarBo]

@caenrigen
I am working on mypy,

Will push a fix today :)

[FarBo]

@caenrigen
I pushed a few things to deal with mypy issues. seems the code is passing mypy check
there is a problem in the CI of the repository, which is unrelated to this PR. That should be fixed, and this branch is updated with that fix to have the CI gets completed for this PR. I will handle that.
Could you test my latest commits to see if they didn't break anything?

[caenrigen]

@caenrigen
I pushed a few things to deal with mypy issues. seems the code is passing mypy check
there is a problem in the CI of the repository, which is unrelated to this PR. That should be fixed, and this branch is updated with that fix to have the CI gets completed for this PR. I will handle that.
Could you test my latest commits to see if they didn't break anything?

Thank you for the help, fixed it with my last commit (the attribute needs to be queried every time)

[jenshnielsen]

@FarBo @caenrigen I submitted a pr over here caenrigen#1 to fix the formatting in the copper mountain driver

[caenrigen]

Thank you for the review and help!

Quick question, when would it be possible to have a release?

[FarBo]

No worries

There is abit of work left for the release step in the CI. Once that is done, we will release a version right after.

[caenrigen]

No worries

There is abit of work left for the release step in the CI. Once that is done, we will release a version right after.

Awesome! Thanks :)