FAQ

Are all VISA attributes and methods implemented?

No. We have implemented those attributes and methods that are most commonly needed. We would like to reach feature parity. If there is something that you need, let us know.

Why are you developing this?

The National Instruments’s VISA is a proprietary library that only works on certain systems. We wanted to provide a compatible alternative.

Why not using LibreVISA?

LibreVISA is still young. However, you can already use it with the NI backend as it has the same API. We think that PyVISA-py is easier to hack and we can quickly reach feature parity with NI-VISA for message-based instruments.

Why putting PyVISA in the middle?

Because it allows you to change the backend easily without changing your application. In other projects, we implemented classes to call USBTMC devices without PyVISA. But this leads to code duplication or an adapter class in your code. By using PyVISA as a frontend to many backends, we abstract these things from higher level applications.