Introduction
The EEZ Studio use Instrument Extensions (IEXTs) to make communication and control of various SCPI enabled instruments easier and efficient. Its installation packages includes IEXT for few instruments including Generic SCPI that could be useful for basic operation such as testing connection using one of the currently supported communication channel and sending basic commands and queries (e.g. *IDN?).
This instruction guide describes all required steps needed to create a new IEXT and how to make it publicly available for other EEZ Studio users.
To display IEXTs (Instrument EXTensions) it will be necessary to open the Extension Manager on the home page of EEZ Studio (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Extension manager selection from the EEZ Studio home page
The Extension manager is working with IEXTs that can be sourced from the GitHub’s IEXT repository where list of approved IEXT can be found (i.e. Instrument Catalog).
Here you can see the total number of available, installed and not yet installed IEXTs (3) from the Instrument Catalog. The EEZ Studio is accessing Instrument Catalog on each start up or every time when Update catalog option is selected (4).
Additionally, it is possible to install IEXT from local storage (4) as well as using the Import instrument definition option from the File menu. The same option is used for direct import of the Keysight’ Offline Command Expert Command set files.
An IEXT include the following items as shown on Fig. 2 and Fig. 3:
- Instrument image/thumbnail (2)
- Interfaces available for establishing communication with instrument e.g. Serial, Ethernet, USBTMC, VISA, etc. (3)
- List of shortcuts (4) and
- SCPI commands and queries help and syntax (5)
Fig. 2: IEXT connection types
Fig. 3: IEXT items available in instrument session view
Once installed, the list of shortcuts that comes with IEXT can be further expanded with additional user defined shortcuts. The shortcuts can be comprised of various SCPI commands and queries or, if defined as a script, it could contain MicroPython or JavaScript code. The list of scripts that could be assigned to a shortcut is available under Scripts tab (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4: Instrument Scripts tab
IEXT for a new instrument or group of instruments can be developed in several steps, starting with a minimal set of included items that can be expanded over time to support in more detail various instrument functions that make communication simpler, more complete and more efficient.
For example, it’s possible to start with adding only basic SCPI commands (i.e. from common set of IEEE488 commands such as *IDN?, *TST? or similar as provided in Generic SCPI IEXT). In next step/revision it’s possible to add instrument image/thumbnail for easier identification, a number of defined SCPI commands could be expanded, then few simple shortcuts can be added. Finally, it is possible to enrich it with various script that can accomplish rather complex task that could save time considerably, and minimize chance of programming mistakes that could ends up with unexpected results.