Pythics README

Pythics is an application for running Python code intended to be used for simple interfaces to laboratory instrument or numerical simulations. It features a simple system for making graphical user interfaces (GUIs), useful controls including plotting, clean separation between GUI and application code, and multithreading and multiprocessing so running backend code does not interfere with the functionality of the GUI. Pythics attempts to robustly handle all of the complex details of writing a program with a GUI for you, allowing you to concentrate on the functionality of your program.

This is the first major public release of Pythics for several years, with updates from the last public release including a port to Python3, Qt5, and Matplotlib 3. Almost all user code will have to be updated to be used with this new version of Pythics, both because of the new Python version and the new consolidated Main control.

Documentation:

The documentation and many examples are built in to pythics under the help menu. The code used to generate the help is in the pythics/help directory, and many further examples are in pythics/examples.

Notes:

Pythics makes heavy use of matplotlib http://matplotlib.org/ and numpy http://www.numpy.org/.

Contributors:

Thomas Fechner, who added command-line launching of Pythics. Ilana Gat, who contributed several feature enhancements. Alex Arsenovic, who wrote the initial Distutils installer setup for Pythics. Richard Graham, who reorganized and greatly improved the docs.

Installation Requirements

The following programs and libraries are required for Pythics to run:

• Python 3.x.

• PyQt5 or PySide2 widget toolkit for GUI.

The following libraries are strongly recommended for basic functionality in Pythics:

• NumPy array support

• matplotlib (3.0.x or later) plotting library.

• lxml for better XML error reporting.

The following additional packages may be helpful for writing scientific code for Pythics:

• PyVISA for communicating with VISA laboratory instruments

• pySerial for communicating with laboratory instruments by RS-232

• SciPy for additional numerical processing routines

Installation

Pythics uses Python Distutils for installation. Installers are available for some platforms.

On Windows, run the installer (.exe). It will install Pythics and place a shortcut on your desktop to launch Pythics.

If an installer is not available for your platform, you can install from a source distribution (.tar.gz or .zip):

• Unpack the archive file.

• run python3 setup.py install

Running

To start Pythics:

• On Linux, go to the pythics/pythics directory and type python3 start.py.

• On Windows, double-click on the shortcut created on your desktop by the installer or go to the pythics/pythics directory and double-click on start.py.

• You can also start pythics from the command line with options as: Usage: python start.py [options]

  Options:

  -h show help text then exit -a selects startup html file -v selects verbose mode -d selects debug mode --help same as -h --app same as -a --verbose same as -v --debug same as -d