OpenTAP: An Open Source Project for Test Automation

[Jurkstas]

Hi all,
has anyone here tried the OpenTAP (https://opentap.io/) yet?

[alm]

No, I haven't, have you?

From their website, it looks somewhat interesting to me, but the fact that it only supports some Keysight instruments severely limits the usability for me. I imagine they're hoping for external contributors to develop those, but that might turn out a chicken and egg problem: the product needs users for people to be motivated to develop  instrument drivers, yet it needs drivers to get users unless you run a pure Keysight lab.

I don't know if there's a generic VISA driver that can send raw SCPI commands.

[Jurkstas]

Not yet, just reading their docs so far. Trying to understand what it is. It seems to have very little attention on Internet, not sure why. I've been passively looking for some platform/framework to formalize my experiments a bit. I am wondering if this could be a good platform for home lab automated experiments or small scale functional testing. The stuff I use professionally is not usable at home due to licensing. Some Keysight's plugins seem to be free for personal and up to 3 user non-enterprise use. From Results Viewer CE EULA:

“Enterprise” means any organization that together with its Affiliates meets one or more of the following criteria:
(a) Possesses more than fifty (50) computers, such as PCs, servers (or equivalent machines); 
(b) Has more than fifty (50) employees; or 
(c) Has more than one million U.S. dollars ($1M US) or the equivalent in other currencies in annual revenues,

[LaurentR]

If you want to hack something at home, just install the Keysight or NI Visa stack and use that as an interface to send SCPI commands. It does USBTMC, IP, Serial, GPIB and many others and it's free.

Most instruments come with a thorough SCPI documentation.

There is a bit of work to write the sequences for each instrument but it's honestly not hard and you want to get to know your instrument anyway. There are plenty of examples of such code on Eevblog using PyVisa (Visa library for Python) or Matlab depending on your preference.