This library offers a perl interface to National Instrument's NI-VISA library.

With this library you can easily control the instruments in your lab (multimeters, voltage sources, magnet sources, pulse generators etc.) with Perl. You can perform complicated measurement jobs with just some Perl loops.

Even better: The Lab::Instrument class reduces the communication overhead to simple read, write and query methods. On top of this, there are specialized instrument classes (virtual instruments) such as Lab::Instrument::HP34401A, that offer even more high level comfort with methods such as read_voltage.

The Lab::Tools (Lab::Tools) package offers classes to simplify the task of logging data to disk and maintaining this data.

Lab::VISA is known to work with GPIB, TCPIP and serial connections. Other interfaces supported by the NI-VISA library are likely to work as well.

This library has been tested to work on Linux and Windows.

Detailed installation instructions are given in Lab::VISA::Installation.

A general introduction to using Lab::Visa is given in Lab::VISA::Tutorial. A powerpoint presentation is available at Tutorial/Talk/Lab-VISA.ppt. The examples shown therein are located in the Tutorial directory of this package. A description of the various APIs can be found in the respective POD sections, i.e. at Lab::VISA.

In case you encounter any problems, you are encouraged to use a public forum for discussion. This way future users will be able to take advantage of your findings.

Lab::VISA now has a homepage.

There is a mailing list set up for Lab::VISA at https://www-mailman.uni-regensburg.de/mailman/listinfo/lab-visa-users

A webbased discussion forum (that can be reached from the CPAN page) is located at http://cpanforum.com/dist/Lab-VISA

Bugs can be reported to https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=Lab-VISA

You will also find that the authors of this package are always happy to receive feedback.

 (c) 2004-2006 Daniel Schröer
 (c) 2007-2010 Daniel Schröer, Andreas Hüttel, Daniela Taubert, and others 

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.