QCoDeS Pulsebuilder aka broadbean

A library for making pulses. Supposed to be used with QCoDeS (in particular its Tektronix AWG 5014 driver), but works as standalone.

The usage is documented in the jupyter notebooks found in the docs folder.

Short description: The broadbean module lets the user compose and manipulate pulse sequences. The aim of the module is to reduce pulse building to the logical minimum of specifications so that building and manipulation become as easy as saying "Gimme a square wave, then a ramp, then a sine, and then wait for 10 ms" and, in particular, "Do the same thing again, but now with the sine having twice the frequency it had before".

The little extra module called ripasso performs frequency filtering and frequency filter compensation. It could be useful in a general setting and is therefore factored out to its own module.

The name: The broad bean is one of my favourite pulses.

Formal requirements

The broadbean package only works with python 3.6+

Installation

On a good day, installation is as easy as

$ git clone https://github.com/QCoDeS/broadbean.git bbdir
$ cd bbdir
$ pip install .

behind the scenes, numpy, matplotlib, and PyQt5 are installed if not found. If pip failed you, you may need to run it as root. But a better idea is to use a virtual enviroment.

You can now fire up a python 3 interpreter and go

>>> import broadbean as bb
>>> from broadbean import ripasso as rp

Documentation

Apart from the example notebooks, auto-generated documentation is available. As for now, the user must built it herself, but that is luckily easy.

In the bbdir folder, do:

$ pip install -r docs_requirements.txt
$ cd docs
$ make html

then ignore all warnings and just have a look at the file bbdir/docs/build/html/index.html.