Minimal Setup for pyVISA & NI GPIB-USB-HS

[JohnPi]

I'm trying to setup a new PC (Win10 Pro) with pyVISA. in the past, I've done this type of thing by installing massive NI libraries & setups -- these run multiple services in the background and in the end I'm not sure what is/isn't necessary and I don't like arbitrary software running on my machines.

Does anyone have a description of the minimal setup needed ? e.g. Can I get by with just the NI GPIB-USB-HS drivers (doesn't seem so) ? I'm sure I don't need the NI PXI services, nor the network services, but what about the other 'helpers' ? Do I need the whole NI-VISA installation ? Can I just extract and move the necessary files from it ?

[JohnPi]

Any hints on this ? I'm setting up and new machine and have to go through this again 

[alm]

I have never tried this, but what I can tell you, is that on the hardware side you will need the USB driver for the GPIB-USB-HS (just check the driver name on another system with NI-VISA installed), and on the Python side, for PyVISA you will need visa-32.dll or visa-64.dll (depending on if you use a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Python), and if you would access GPIB through PyVISA-py, you would need gpib-32.dll (looks like this only supports 32-bit Python). As for what is needed to make those components communicate, like other DLL files, drivers or services, that would require trial and error, or investigating an existing NI-VISA installation using tools like Process Monitor or Dependency Walker. If you go through this exercise, then please post the results here.

[nctnico]

Recently I dabbled a bit with PyVisa and the latest version no longer depends on NI-VISA libraries. At least on Linux.

Edit: the library for a pure Python instrument interface is called pyvisa-py (https://pyvisa-py.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ ). The only interface not supported seem to be hardware GPIB cards. Serial port, ethernet and USBTMC seem to be supported.

[jjoonathan]

If you buy a VXI11 Ethernet-GPIB adapter (e.g. I use AD007s) you don't need to install USB drivers, you just add pyvisa-py to your pip list and go! Also, routing, sharing between hosts, and passthrough to VM becomes trivial