InstrumentRs core library

This is the InstrumentRs core library, which provides the basic functionality to build Rust instrument drivers.

lib.rs:

InstrumentRs: Talk to your (scientific) equipment from with Rust

The InstrumentRs library provides standardized interfaces to talk to scientific equipment via various different ports. To do so, it provides an InstrumentInterface trait and its implementations. Furthermore, we also provide an InstrumentError error type that instrument drivers should return. Any connection type that implements the std::io::Read and std::io::Write traits can be used as an instrument interface. Furthermore, we also provide simplified access to the following interfaces:

• TCP/IP (blocking) using the std::net module.
• Serial (blocking) using the serialport crate (feature "serial").

We are planning in the future to also support asynchronous interfaces.

Example

The following shows a simple example on how to get an Instrument interface using a simple socket address.

use std::net::SocketAddr;
use instrumentrs::TcpIpInterface;

let address = "192.168.1.10:8000";
let inst_interface = TcpIpInterface::simple(address);

You can now take this instrument interface and pass it to any of the instrument drivers, of course assuming that the actual instrument is connected to this interface.

Goals and non-goals of this project

InstrumentRs shall provide a simple framework that allows you write your own instrument driver and share it with the community. It should allow you to focus on the driver design itself and take care of the interfacing for you. This allows your driver to be flexible, i.e., a serial device can be connected to a computer via RS232, but can also be connected via an ethernet to serial interface. InstrumentRs will take care of sending the correct commands for a specified instrument in the background.

While InstrumentRs is not a collection of drivers and only allows you to write a simplified driver, we will host drivers here as well and maintain them. This means: If you would like to write a driver but do not want to maintain it, please raise an issue in the InstrumentRs repository on GitHub in order to get your driver added here. This means that we will take over maintainership of the driver and release them as bugs get squished, etc. In order for this to work, all functionality of your instrument driver must be tested with hardware, but also with tests using the provided LoopbackInterface.

Inspiration

This project is heavily inspired by the fantastic instrumentkit library that allows to control instruments from Python.

Status

This project is currently under active development and (breaking) changes might occure fast. If you are interested in using this project and/or contributing, please get in touch by raising an issue on GitHub. This would also be super valuable as we would learn how it is used, what the need is, etc.

License

Licensed under either

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.