Instrument Control (iC) – An Open-Source Software to Automate Test Equipment

It has become common practice to automate data acquisition from programmable instrumentation, and a range of different software solutions fulfill this task. Many routine measurements require sequential processing of certain tasks, for instance to adjust the temperature of a sample stage, take a measurement, and repeat that cycle for other temperatures. This paper introduces an open-source Java program that processes a series of text-based commands that define the measurement sequence. These commands are in an intuitive format which provides great flexibility and allows quick and easy adaptation to various measurement needs. For each of these commands, the iC-framework calls a corresponding Java method that addresses the specified instrument to perform the desired task. The functionality of iC can be extended with minimal programming effort in Java or Python, and new measurement equipment can be addressed by defining new commands in a text file without any programming.