Advanced

You can mix the high-level object-oriented approach described in this document with middle- and low-level VISA function calls (See Architecture for more information). By doing so, you have full control of your devices:

After you have instantiated the ResourceManager:

>>> import visa
>>> rm = visa.ResourceManager()

you can access corresponding the VisaLibrary instance under the visalib. attribute. The VisaLibrary object contains low-level functions as directly exposed by the foreign library, for example:

>>> rm.visalib.viMapAddress(<here goes the arguments>)

To call this functions you need to know the function declaration and how to interface it to python. To help you out, the VisaLibrary object also contains middle-level functions. Each middle-level function wraps one low-level function. In this case:

>>> rm.visalib.map_address(<here goes the arguments>)

The calling convention and types are handled by the wrapper.

You can recognize low an middle-level functions by their names. Low-level functions carry the same name as in the shared library, and they are prefixed by vi. Middle-level functions have a friendlier, more pythonic but still recognizable name.