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mrSCPI is a software tool for controlling programmable test equipment; however, I think of mrSCPI as more of a test bench productivity tool.

From a software/hardware architectural perspective, programmable test equipment is designed in such a way so as to make very complex test automation possible. Systems designed from the ground up to support very complex use cases frequently overly complicate things for people with simple use cases. Larry Wall captured the phenomenon quite clearly when he said:

Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible. 
Professional programming languages tend to make all things equally difficult.

mrSCPI aims to make it possible to easily integrate test equipment automation into my day to day bench workflow. The goal is to make it so easy that I use it even for the hundreds of tiny, repetitive tasks I preform at the bench.

If you are wondering if mrSCPI is for you, that emphasized ”my” is a warning! mrSCPI is very much designed around my personal workflow and tool preferences. I very much like command line tools with UNIX’ish interfaces. If this sounds like you, then mrSCPI might be for you. OTOH, if you were looking for a nice GUI to control your equipment, then you will most likely be quite disappointed with mrSCPI.

Lastly, mrSCPI is simple to set-up so I can run it anyplace. It has no dependencies beyond a standard Ruby install. No drivers. No modules. No packages. No PIPs. No GEMs. Nothing to compile. Just a single script – yes, the library and the executable are the same file!

Links:

• Documentation: https://richmit.github.io/mrSCPI/
• Additional examples: https://github.com/richmit/TestEquipmentScripts
• Github repo:: https://github.com/richmit/mrSCPI