docs: Write getting started guide(s).

[giulioungaretti]

I just realised there is no such a thing (or am I stupid and did not find it ?).

We need at least a:

• getting started with qcodes page in docs
• write your driver how- to
• step by step cook book to make your first measurement

[giulioungaretti]

I think I will start working on the driver thing while I help out @ThomasKanne getting started!

[AdriaanRol]

@giulioungaretti
I have recently been giving a few presentations on our data acquisition software (QCoDeS + PycQED) and one thing I like to emphasize is that we tried to minimize the total number of concepts such that it is easy to learn.

I think a similar approach can be useful for QCoDes.

As in in order to understand QCoDes you need to understand the following concepts. Our list of concepts is

• Instrument (or component)
• Loop
• Parameter
• Analysis

Instrument/ component, an object that contains parameters, can correspond to a physical instrument but does not have to (e.g. meta-instrument such as flux-control or composite AWG or some abstract component such as a qubit object)

Loop: the measurement loop, simplest example is the 1D soft loop, a fancy for loop that sets and gets some parameters and takes care of the logging, datasaving and (optionally the live plotting), returns a dataset. A loop can also be n-dimensional, hardware controlled (instead of setting points 1 by 1 they are set in chunks (corresponding to say the length of your AWG sequence or the size of your acquisition memory)

Parameter: Anything that is either get and/or settable, contains metadata such as a name, label and units to facilitate data storing and plotting. Can also be a composite parameter that contains other parameters.

Analysis: I name it here explicitly because without it it is impossible to close the automation loop. Something that accepts a dateset (output of a Loop), analyzes the data (plots and saves figures etc) and potentially returns some fitted parameters. This is also something that is not in the current version of QCoDeS

This is the list that I currently have for our way of using QCoDes. As far as I can tell the mapping to QCoDeS is one to one, however there are also some concepts which are in QCoDeS that are not in my list. I'd say those are

• Station
• Dataset

Then there are some advanced concepts which should be used but IMO should be clearly distinguished from the basic concepts. These are concepts such as:

• Instrument server
• Data formatter
  Basically anything multi-processing related that is of interest when you start making your own code but not when you just want to use QCoDeS

[giulioungaretti]

@AdriaanRol @MerlinSmiles @peendebak it would be really helpful for this task to get my hands on some of your code/experiments stuff.
Do you think it would be possible to share some of the things you are doing, privately ?

[MerlinSmiles]

You have mine already, or did you loose it?

[giulioungaretti]

@MerlinSmiles yas I do have yours