pulseblock

Package for construction of pulse sequences in Jupyter Notebook.

The package consists of:

• the main class - PulseBlock (in pulse_block.py module);
• custom-written Pulse classes, which are inserted into a PulseBlock instance (pulse.py module),
• several handy tools:
  • iplot() - function for in-line graphical visualisation of a PulseBlock object
  • pb_sample() - function for sampling a PulseBlock object into time-disrcetized array for sending it to a waveform-generating device;
  • pb_zip() - function for collapsing large wait periods into repetitions of a single short one. This allows to save memory of a waveform-generating device if it supports hardware-timed sequencing mode.

PulseBlock is essentially a container which has several "shelves" (channels), and each pulse is represented by a "box" (Pulse object) sitting on the shelf. Each "box" must have a name tag: "channel name - start time - duration". PulseBlock makes no additional assumptions about the contents of the boxes.

Since the "boxes" do not necessarily cover the entire duration, there are some gaps. To specify what is happening during the gaps, one uses DfltPulse objects - "default pulses" (a single DfltPulse per channel).

PulseBlock logic handles everything related to keeping the "boxes" time-ordered when new elements are added: it has methods for inserting additional "boxes" into arbitrary (empty) places on the "shelf" and for merging several smaller PulseBlock objects into a large one.

To get a feeling of pulseblock workflow, see Tutorial Jupyter Notebook [the notebook itself is located in Demo folder].