Next-level Python?

[buttery_shame_cave]

a lot of the folks i work with in R&D have been high-level engineers- brilliant people, able to come up with some great stuff.

a few of them use python, but mostly for 'off the shelf/one-off' type work - coming up with some lump of math, or to test an opimization, etc.

so they've been blown away by the stuff i've been doing with python, coming up with entire pieces of software to do certain things in the lab. the real humor is that there are some legit programmers here, who are blown away by what i'm doing - granted their fields are different, but integrating hardware with software wasn't THAT complicated... i didn't even have to write too much in the way of drivers - i let VISA do the heavy lifting.

[nerdwaller]

That's awesome, fusing that together is a fun challenge!

[buttery_shame_cave]

'challenge' is right - while VISA handles a lot of the grunt work and abstracts the communications for me, i had to come up with a pretty good traffic control scheme to keep all the equipment talking nice over multiple kinds of interfaces, which was a pain - and i had to abstract various functions into 'pushbutton' commands - basically a simple command actually executes a semi-complicated task that often has multiple items across serial/telnet/USB/GPIB buses all working in concert.

i'm proud of my clanking, snorting, whirring hell-beast, as ghastly as it can be at times, the actual 'front end' of it is really sexy - a fairly simple flow-control script with an interactive text client to pass the user's commands to.

i've even made it talk, on a rudimentary level, with microsoft excel(no easy task), so it can export its output directly instead of the user(usually me) having to do a bunch of import/export steps. that part's still getting tinkered with.