psychopy.hardware - hardware interfaces

PsychoPy® can access a wide range of external hardware. For some devices the interface has already been created in the following sub-packages of PsychoPy®. For others you may need to write the code to access the serial port etc. manually.

Contents:

psychopy.hardware.findPhotometer(ports=None, device=None)[source]

Try to find a connected photometer/photospectrometer!

PsychoPy will sweep a series of serial ports trying to open them. If a port successfully opens then it will try to issue a command to the device. If it responds with one of the expected values then it is assumed to be the appropriate device.

Parameters:

  • ports (list) – A list of ports to search. Each port can be a string (e.g. ‘COM1’, ‘/dev/tty.Keyspan1.1’) or a number (for win32 comports only). If None is provided then PsychoPy will sweep COM0-10 on Win32 and search known likely port names on MacOS and Linux.

  • device (str) – String giving expected device (e.g. ‘PR650’, ‘PR655’, ‘CS100A’, ‘LS100’, ‘LS110’, ‘S470’). If this is not given then an attempt will be made to find a device of any type, but this often fails.

Returns:

An object representing the first photometer found, None if the ports didn’t yield a valid response. None if there were not even any valid ports (suggesting a driver not being installed.)

Return type:

object or None

Examples

Sweeps ports 0 to 10 searching for a PR655:

photom = findPhotometer(device='PR655')
print(photom.getLum())
if hasattr(photom, 'getSpectrum'):
    # can retrieve spectrum (e.g. a PR650)
    print(photom.getSpectrum())

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