Spectrum Instrumentation, a digitizer and generator specialist, announced today the release of a new open source Python package, 'spcm', applicable to all of the company's test and measurement products.

It supports faster and easier programming with sampling rates from 5MS/s to 10GS/s for over 200 instruments. Python is widely used for its simplicity, versatility, and flexibility, and has a wide range of libraries and frameworks such as NumPy that greatly shorten the programming development cycle.

The new spcm package provides a high-level Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) interface designed for Spectrum Instruments digitizers, AWGs, and digital I/O products, enabling users to get the most out of the Python language.

The package also includes full source code and various detailed examples. spcm is available for free on GitHub under the MIT license.

The Spectrum Python package automatically opens and closes cards, card groups, and Ethernet devices, and safely handles memory allocation for moving data between devices.

Additionally, all features are standardized and extracted for ease of use, depending on the device. These include functions such as clock and trigger settings, hardware channel settings, card synchronization, Direct Memory Access (DMA), block averaging, DDS, and pulse generator.

The package can use real physical quantities and units, such as 10MHz, allowing users to directly program driver settings in their preferred unit system. This reduces the need for cumbersome manual conversion to encrypted API settings.

It also supports operations via NumPy and Matplotlib, allowing users to process data between products using the toolboxes of those packages. Detailed examples can be found in the GitHub repository.

The package can be easily installed via the pip repository, i.e. after installing Python, it can be easily installed via the command 'pip install spcm'.

Users can add more functionality by including Spectrum's Python packages in their own programs or by extracting them from the repository. These packages are maintained and maintained by Spectrum engineers and updates are released regularly to fix bugs or provide new features.

The Spectrum Python repository is available at https://github.com/SpectrumInstrumentation/spcm.