1. Getting Started

pyniscope is a wrapper for the NI-SCOPE drivers from National Instruments.

Installing

1. Download and install the NI-SCOPE driver from National Instruments. It's big and bloaty. Make sure it installs NI-MAX (the "measurement and automation explorer") as well.
2. Download the pyniscope zip file and unzip its contents into a temporary directory of your choosing.
3. From the command line, navigate to this temporary directory and run the command python setup.py install. This should copy everything into your site-packages (or dist-packages) directory.

Basic Testing

Run the NI-MAX program that came with NI-SCOPE, and under the "Devices and Interfaces", look for your NI-SCOPE card and determine its name. For the following, let's call the device "Carl".

First we have to import the pyniscope library and create an instance of the "Scope" object:

>>> import niscope
>>> s = niscope.Scope("Carl")

Next, configure the timing, vertical scale, and trigger method:

>>> s.ConfigureHorizontalTiming()
>>> s.ConfigureVertical()
0
>>> s.ConfigureTrigger()

At this point, the scope is ready to acquire data with the default parameters. The following command:

>>> s.InitiateAcquisition()

will "arm" the acquisition. To retrieve next (triggered) data set:

>>> s.Fetch()

This will return a (weirdly-transposed) numpy array of y-values. It's up to you to keep track of the time step, as specified by the "sampleRate" argument in s.ConfigureHorizontalTiming().

How to figure out the rest

It seems the best way to learn how to use the card's full set of features is to search the NI site and download the NI-SCOPE Function Reference Help (for the C programming language). The functions listed there look similar to those called above.

Example hacky way to query the attached scope names

import niscope  as _niscope
import ctypes   as _ctypes

string_buffer = ' '*1024

def get_scope_names():
    """
    Hackily returns a list of the NI-SCOPE devices present on the machine.
    """
    
    # we're in C Land, so we have to declare our variables explicitly
    device_count      = _ctypes.c_int32()
    
    # handle by which to interact with the NI hardware
    vi_session        = _niscope.ViSession()
    
    # handle to the dll that came with the NI software
    niModInstDLL      = _ctypes.WinDLL('niModInst')
    
    # DLL call to count the number of SCOPE devices
    getattr(niModInstDLL, 
           'niModInst_OpenInstalledDevicesSession')(
        'NI-SCOPE',                     # type of device
        _ctypes.byref(vi_session),      # session handle
        _ctypes.byref(device_count))    # number of devices
    
    # assemble a list of devices
    devices = []
    for n in range(device_count.value):
        getattr(niModInstDLL, 
               'niModInst_GetInstalledDeviceAttributeViString')(
            vi_session,         # session handle
            n,                  # index of device
            0,                  # 0 means device name
            len(string_buffer), # length of the query
            string_buffer)      # place to dump the data
        
        
        # strip off the BS and add it to the list!
        devices.append(string_buffer[0:string_buffer.find('\x00')])
    
    return devices