Hardware control reference

The hardware control package consists of several classes that define the main functionality, e.g. a Qt-app and Qt-main-window, classes to start a thread that will communicate with an instrument, several custom Qt-widgets that come in handy, for example, for plotting data and then instrument drivers for different hardware and pre-defined Qt-frontends. One main goal is to have reusable frontends for similar types of instruments to make writing GUIs easy.

To make this easy, we provide custom versions of common Qt widgets and other classes, which are based on Qt classes but have additional methods to connect, for example, to the main app._data. As an example, HCLabel populates the text of a Qt-Label with the read value from an instrument.

The package is split into three parts:

Main elements:

• Base Classes
• GUI Elements
• Instrument Drivers