rampage

rampage is an arbitrary waveform builder and a control system for ultra-cold atom and ion trap experiments. It is written in python and is primarily GUI based, with modules available to edit and run ramps over the command line. It follows a client-server architecture: the server is a command line program running on the control PC and the client communicates with the server via TCP/IP using zeromq. This allows the experiment to be controlled from anywhere within the local network.

rampage consists of four parts:

• Implementation of a JSON based ramp description format
• A PyQt4 based GUI to edit the ramp description
• A server that converts a ramp description into analog and digital waveforms, uploads these on National Instruments DAQ cards, and controls the experiment.
• A ramp queuer for batch running.

Requirements

rampage is written in PyQt4 and uses pyqtgraph for plotting. Hence, it is completely cross-platform. It has been tested on Windows, Mac and Linux using python 2.7. The following python packages are required:

• PyQt4
• pyqtpgraph
• numpy
• zeromq

Except for PyQt4, all packages can be installed using pip:

pip install pyqtgraph
pip install numpy
pip install pyzmq

pip does not install PyQt4 correctly. Get the wheel package from here and install it.

Installation

pip install rampage

If you wish to modify the code, download the package in a local directory and install it in develop mode.

cd path/to/installation
git clone https://github.com/shreyaspotnis/rampage
cd rampage
python setup.py develop

Running

python -m rampage