pyvisa instrument initialization error

[nekrutnikolai]

I'm trying to use a Yokogawa GS200 via the visapy-py backend with QCoDeS following the example in the docs, but I'm getting the following error for some reason:

VisaIOError: VI_ERROR_NSUP_OPER (-1073807257): The given session or object reference does not support this operation.

Here what I have done step-by-step to get to this point:

First, I imported the necessary packages:

import numpy as np
import time
import qcodes
import pyvisa

from qcodes.instrument_drivers.yokogawa.GS200 import GS200

Then, I tested to make sure that the GS200 was detected over USB:

pyvisa.ResourceManager().list_resources()

Which gave the following output:

('ASRL/dev/ttyS4::INSTR', 'USB0::2849::57::91LA25023::0::INSTR')

And then, when I tried initializing it with the driver through QCoDeS:

gs = GS200("gs200", address='USB0::0xB21::0x39::91LA25023::0::INSTR', terminator="\n", visalib='@py')

Here is the full output of the error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
VisaIOError                               Traceback (most recent call last)
Input In [4], in <cell line: 2>()
      1 # intialize the instrument with the following parameters
----> 2 gs = GS200("gs200", address='USB0::0xB21::0x39::91LA25023::0::INSTR', terminator="\n", visalib='@py')

File ~/miniconda3/envs/qcodes/lib/python3.9/site-packages/qcodes/instrument/base.py:517, in AbstractInstrumentMeta.__call__(cls, *args, **kwargs)
    512 def __call__(cls, *args: Any, **kwargs: Any) -> Any:
    513     """
    514     Overloads `type.__call__` to add code that runs only if __init__ completes
    515     successfully.
    516     """
--> 517     new_inst = super().__call__(*args, **kwargs)
    518     is_abstract = new_inst._is_abstract()
    519     if is_abstract:

File ~/miniconda3/envs/qcodes/lib/python3.9/site-packages/qcodes/instrument_drivers/yokogawa/GS200.py:241, in GS200.__init__(self, name, address, terminator, **kwargs)
    239 def __init__(self, name: str, address: str, terminator: str = "\n",
    240              **kwargs: Any) -> None:
--> 241     super().__init__(name, address, terminator=terminator, **kwargs)
    243     self.add_parameter('output',
    244                        label='Output State',
    245                        get_cmd=self.state,
   (...)
    249                            'on': 1,
    250                        })
    252     self.add_parameter('source_mode',
    253                        label='Source Mode',
    254                        get_cmd=':SOUR:FUNC?',
    255                        set_cmd=self._set_source_mode,
    256                        vals=Enum('VOLT', 'CURR'))

File ~/miniconda3/envs/qcodes/lib/python3.9/site-packages/qcodes/instrument/visa.py:92, in VisaInstrument.__init__(self, name, address, timeout, terminator, device_clear, visalib, **kwargs)
     89     raise e
     91 if device_clear:
---> 92     self.device_clear()
     94 self.set_terminator(terminator)
     95 self.timeout.set(timeout)

File ~/miniconda3/envs/qcodes/lib/python3.9/site-packages/qcodes/instrument/visa.py:151, in VisaInstrument.device_clear(self)
    149     self.visa_handle.flush(flush_operation)
    150 else:
--> 151     self.visa_handle.clear()

File ~/miniconda3/envs/qcodes/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pyvisa/resources/resource.py:397, in Resource.clear(self)
    395 def clear(self) -> None:
    396     """Clear this resource."""
--> 397     self.visalib.clear(self.session)

File ~/miniconda3/envs/qcodes/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pyvisa_py/highlevel.py:191, in PyVisaLibrary.clear(self, session)
    189 except KeyError:
    190     return self.handle_return_value(session, StatusCode.error_invalid_object)
--> 191 return self.handle_return_value(session, sess.clear())

File ~/miniconda3/envs/qcodes/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pyvisa/highlevel.py:251, in VisaLibraryBase.handle_return_value(self, session, status_code)
    248     self._last_status_in_session[session] = rv
    250 if rv < 0:
--> 251     raise errors.VisaIOError(rv)
    253 if rv in self.issue_warning_on:
    254     if session and rv not in self._ignore_warning_in_session[session]:

VisaIOError: VI_ERROR_NSUP_OPER (-1073807257): The given session or object reference does not support this operation.

Additionally, I verified the output of the python -m visa info command and everything looks fine:

/home/nikolai/miniconda3/envs/qcodes/lib/python3.9/site-packages/visa.py:13: FutureWarning: The visa module provided by PyVISA is being deprecated. You can replace `import visa` by `import pyvisa as visa` to achieve the same effect.

The reason for the deprecation is the possible conflict with the visa package provided by the https://github.com/visa-sdk/visa-python which can result in hard to debug situations.
  warnings.warn(
Machine Details:
   Platform ID:    Linux-5.15.0-37-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.35
   Processor:      x86_64

Python:
   Implementation: CPython
   Executable:     /home/nikolai/miniconda3/envs/qcodes/bin/python
   Version:        3.9.12
   Compiler:       GCC 7.5.0
   Bits:           64bit
   Build:          Jun  1 2022 11:38:51 (#main)
   Unicode:        UCS4

PyVISA Version: 1.11.3

Backends:
   ivi:
      Version: 1.11.3 (bundled with PyVISA)
      Binary library: Not found
   py:
      Version: 0.5.2
      ASRL INSTR: Available via PySerial (3.5)
      USB INSTR: Available via PyUSB (1.2.1). Backend: libusb1
      USB RAW: Available via PyUSB (1.2.1). Backend: libusb1
      TCPIP INSTR: Available 
      TCPIP SOCKET: Available 
      GPIB INSTR:
         Please install linux-gpib (Linux) or gpib-ctypes (Windows, Linux) to use this resource type. Note that installing gpib-ctypes will give you access to a broader range of funcionality.
         No module named 'gpib'
``

[jenshnielsen]

If you look at the output of visa info (btw you should run pyvisa-info and you will not get the deprecation warning) you can see that you don't have any binary libraries for the IVI backend (NI, Keysight etc) you however have the python backend. We generally do not recommend or support the python backend https://qcodes.github.io/Qcodes/start/index.html#other-dependencies. Any of the IVI backends should work mostly equally but we have seen some issues with the NI backend that seems to go away with the Keysight one so that is what we recommend at the moment.

In this particular case we are using a visa feature to reset the buffer of the instrument on connection to prevent you connecting to an instrument that already has messages in its output buffer since that would create a situation where the output from the instrument does not match the input that you read. It seems like the python visa backend does not support this. You can disable that by passing device_clear=False to __init__ when you create the instrument that should fix this issue, but I would recommend you to use a ivi backend.

e.g. on my windows computer with the NI libraries installed I see something like this

[nekrutnikolai]

Thank you for your quick reply, I installed the NI-visa drivers and it worked!