[Qtlab-users] QTLab

[Reinier H. <re...@he...>]

Dear QTlab users,

This is the first serious mail we're sending to the qtlab-users
mailing list. We'd like to share some of the recent progress with you
as well as motivate you to send relevant code back to us. Welcome to
new list members btw: we subscribed some people we suspect to use
QTlab, but if you don't want to be on the list you can remove yourself
here: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/qtlab-users.
Questions and comments can also be posted to this list!

So, for the new stuff:

- Many people are still on the 'old' qtlab (v0.2), which had the gui
and the 'shell' (where you type commands and run scripts) in the same
process. The latest version (on git here:
http://qtwork.nano.tudelft.nl/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=qtlab;a=summary)
has this separated in 2 processes. This is much better for stability
and both gui and shell response time. We are going to make a new
'release' version of 0.3 soon.

- The new version of course has many bug-fixes, but is certainly not
bug-free. If you run into trouble, please report it at
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=1166556&group_id=274525&func=browse

- New instruments are added continuously, see
http://qtwork.nano.tudelft.nl/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=qtlab;a=tree;f=instrument_plugins;h=d7a876c76f53889a7dee137cb7b809e4da4a13c9;hb=d1e2f78de1cd7c21130f09efb1b846efd7cc2336
for the current list.

This also brings us to the next point: we'd like to motivate you to
contribute back to QTlab. The easiest components to contribute are
instrument drivers and there probably are many candidates around. You
can always send these to Pieter or Reinier (or to this list): we're
more than happy to have a quick look, perhaps fix some small things
and put it in git. This way other users can also profit from your
work! Other extensions that come to mind are COM object or DLL
interfaces, file readers, gui extensions or math libraries (all of
which live in source/lib). This will make life easier and more
pleasant for all QTlab users.

Of course new ideas are also welcome, but our time is limited so
unfortunately we cannot guarantee that we can realize them (all).
However, QTlab was intended as a shared project, so do not hesitate to
implement things yourself.

We believe QTlab at the moment is a pretty stable set of components
and does the trick for most experiments.

Happy measuring!

Regards,
Reinier and Pieter