The Zurich Instruments Labber Drivers are a collection of instrument drivers for the scientific measurement software Labber. They provide a high-level interface of Zurich Instruments devices such as

• the PQSC Programmable Quantum System Controller
• the HDAWG Arbitrary Waveform Generator
• the UHFQA and SHFQA Quantum Analyzers
• the MFLI and UHFLI Lock-In Amplifiers

The Labber drivers are based on the Zurich Instruments Toolkit (zhinst-toolkit), an extension of our Python API ziPython for high-level instrument control.

The Zurich Instruments Labber Drivers are well tested and considered stable enough for general usage. The interfaces may have some incompatible changes between releases. Please check the changelog if you are upgrading.

As prerequisite, the LabOne software version 20.01 or later must be installed. It can be downloaded for free at https://www.zhinst.com/labone. Follow the installation instructions specific to your platform. Verify that you can connect to your instrument(s) using the web interface of LabOne. If you are upgrading from an older version, be sure to update the firmware of al your devices using the web interface before continuing. In principle LabOne can be installed in a remote machine, but we highly recommend to install on the local machine where you intend to run the experiment.

Download this repository as ZIP folder and unpack its content. It contains a set of folders with the names 'Zurich_Instruments_XXXX' that define the instrument drivers. In order to make the drivers available in Labber, the folders 'Zurich_Instruments_XXXX' need to be copied to your local Labber Drivers folder. It is located in 'C:\Users\USERNAME\Labber\Drivers' or similar. Once the driver folders are copied to your local Labber Drivers folder, they are available to be selected in the Labber Instrument Server.

The Zurich Instruments Labber Drivers are based on the Zurich Instruments Toolkit and a small set of third party packages. A complete list can be found inside the requirements.txt. There are two ways to install these dependencies:

Labber comes with its own Python distribution that is used by default. The required packages needs to be installed with to this Python distribution, which is done using Labber's own pip package manager. It is located (on Windows) under C:\Program Files '(x86)\Labber\python-labber\Scripts\pip.exe' or similar.

From within the unpacked project folder run:

<path to Labber Scripts folder>\pip install -r requirements.txt

Alternatively, Labber can also configured to use your own Python distribution. Under Instrument Server -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Python Distribution you can point Labber to a different Python distribution, for example your Anaconda environment. If you chose for example you base Anaconda environment, install the required packages as followed.

From within the unpacked project folder run:

conda activate base
pip install -r requirements.txt

To see if your installation was successful, try to connect to your device. Add the instrument driver of your model to the Instrument Server with the serial number (e.g. 'dev1234') in the Address field and start the instrument. If the window turns green and no error emssage appears, you are ready to go!