Buffered

Instrument-internal fast sweeps, where the hardware acquires a block of points without a round trip per point.

Qanary does the orchestration – parsing the node tree, arming the instruments, fetching results and reporting progress. The instrument-specific nodes themselves live in QCDrivers under qcdrivers.buffered, grouped by manufacturer.

qanary.buffered.sweep exports no public names: every helper in it is internal and underscore-prefixed, driven by qanary.measure.run() rather than called directly. What follows is the contract between the two packages, which is what a measurement script and a driver author both need.

The sweep tree

A buffered measurement is described by a nested dictionary handed to qanary.measure.run(). Each level names one instrument node, the sweeps it drives, and the child nodes triggered beneath it:

buffered_sweep = {
    "instrument": NodeBaselDAC(inst=dac),
    "sweeps": [gate_sweep],
    "nodes": [
        {
            "instrument": NodeMFLI(inst=lockin),
            "dependent": [lockin_r, lockin_p],
            "grid_mode": "exact",
            "input_trigger": "trigger_in_1",
            "trigger_level": 0.3,
        }
    ],
}

measure.run([buffered_sweep], dependents=[], **run_dict)

The root node sweeps; leaf nodes acquire. Qanary walks the tree to size the dataset, arms every instrument, runs the sweep, then reshapes what comes back into the dataset’s coordinates.

The node contract

Any class used as an "instrument" must provide these, which is all Qanary calls on it:

Method	Purpose
register_sweep	Accept one or two sweeps and program the geometry into the hardware.
register_dependent	Accept the parameters to acquire and configure the acquisition.
run_sweep	Start the programmed sweep.
fetch	Return the acquired block, shaped to the registered geometry.
abort	Stop a running acquisition; a no-op if nothing is running.
toplevel	Whether this node is the root of the tree.

Nodes are typed against a structural SweepLike protocol rather than importing qanary.sweep.Sweep, so QCDrivers does not depend on Qanary. CircularSweep and SegmentedSweep satisfy it too.

See Tutorials for worked examples.