Changelog for QCoDeS 0.8.0

The November 2019 release of QCoDeS

New:

  • Introduce ‘safe experiment abort’ feature: On ctrl-c the running experiment will be halted, but ongoing VISA commands will be completed and all captured data will be written to the database, so that the system is left in a clean state. A second ‘ctrl-c’ event will stop the execution without any of those safty measures and will thereby reproduce the previous behavior of a single ‘ctrl-c’. (#1701)

  • Added validation of station configuration files, including live linting and auto-complete features for vscode (#1759).

  • Enable setting parameters on ChannelLists in the station config file (#1785)

Improved:

  • Complete overhaul of the parameter cache including GetLatest. This improves API experience, removes dangerous bugs as well as sources of potential new bugs. (#1757, #1790, #1789, #1768, #1787, #1788, #1827, #1832)

  • Enable logging from multiple processes at the same time (#1816)

  • Documentation: Add new documentation (DataSet #1715), remove outdated documentation (#1779) and improve existing. (#1780, #1771, #1770, #1781, #1777, #1798, #1803)

  • Added more and fixed type Annotations. (#1769, #1797, #1794, #1795, #1807, #1811, #1814, #1815, #1817, #1822)

  • Added name kwarg for initialising Measurement objects (#1741)

  • Bugfix: properly write complex standalone parameter to DB (#1823)

  • consistent snapshot_base signatures. (#1768)

  • enable customized log messages for measurement start and end events (#1808)

New Instrument drivers:

  • Driver for AimTTi Pl601-P (#1763)

Under the hood:

  • Deprecation decorator for classes (#1805, #1806)

  • Improved CI/CD (#1774)

  • Make tests less flaky (#1772, #1826)

  • Docs build on sphinx 2.2.0 (#1783)

  • Getting ready for python 3.8 (#1793)

  • Mypy version 0.740 adaption (#1794)

  • Consistent linting through .pylintrc (#1804)

  • Fix local docs built (#1803)

Breaking Changes:

  • The name and short_name attributes of InstrumentBase became read-only properties because it should not be possible to change them on an instantiated instrument. (#1820)

  • deferred operations have been removed (#1818).

Deprecations:

  • There has been a great contribution of community drivers over the years and and encourage the community to further contribute. To ensure a continued high quality standard of the ‘core’ drivers and reduce the latencies of contributed drivers we split out drivers for devices that are not being used within the Microsoft Quantum Program into a separate repository that will be community maintained. Find the qcodes_contrib_drivers here: https://github.com/QCoDeS/Qcodes_contrib_drivers

  • Module qcodes.utils.zmq_helpers (#1819)