PSLab Python Status Report and Next Steps

[Mario Behling]

Dear all,

I received a message from Alex about his involvement. Unfortunately he will have to scale-down his involvement in the project for the time being, but he will try to join up with us when-ever possible still. 

@Alex: Thanks a lot for your contributions and support. We will work hard to make things happen and make you proud.

Alex kindly shared some details with me to help us move forward with the project and the Python library specifically.

Please find the details below. 

All the best!

Mario

--

Sent from Alex:

 

For now, I am sending a status report of where pslab-python is at and what the next steps are.
There are four open pull requests:

 

#130, which orangecms is working on. He's got that one under control, and he should feel free to merge it when he thinks it's ready. If he wants he can ask me review it again before merge, but I cannot promise I will have time to look at it.

 

#147 is almost ready to be merged. All that remains is adding recorded serial traffic for two of the tests. I will try to get around to it, but another possibility is to undo the last commit (which adds the tests that need serial traffic recordings) and then merge it without those tests.

 

#153 could be merged with rather little effort, it just needs to be changed to not break our current tests. This is an easy task, but the contributor has lost interest in it. Alternatively, it could be rejected. The work that had been done in this PR is not complicated and could be redone fairly quickly.

 

#155 is ready for merge, but should ideally be merged after #147 to simplify the merge process. It could be merged before, but #155 will need to be rebased.

 

Then there is the matter of releasing a stable version of pslab-python. I was hoping to do that before the end of the year, but that no longer seems possible. The tasks I had intended to complete before release are merging #147, #155, and maybe #153. #130 could be merged after release. In addition to merging these, I wanted to finish refactorization of the power supplt module. #153 is a start of this refactorization, but more work is needed. Finally, I wanted to clean up the API of the recently refactored user-facing modules (oscilloscope, logic_analyzer, waveform_generator, multimeter, and potentially power_supply) to make sure the method signatures are as similar as possible. Also, make sure the API documentation can be autogenereted from the docstrings.

 

I would still like to do all of the above, but I cannot say when I will get around to it.

 

Alternatively, if you want to release something as soon as possible, I would recommend just merging #155, and maybe #147 first.