On the NI-VISA boards there has been some frustration where folks cannot get NI-VISA to work on macOS Catalina because Catalina (macOS 10.15.x) is "not supported" by NI-VISA (for many months, it seems). Currently, the README shows:
NI-VISA 19.0 for macOS supports the following platforms:
macOS 10.14.x
macOS 10.13.x
macOS Catalina, of course, is 10.15.x.
After digging around, I found this post regarding Isaac:
Download Isaac for Mac version 5.1, works with Catalina! - Tue Nov 26, 2019 10:16 am
So, made a FULL BACKUP of my Mac Pro before attempting this, and it worked. From the post above, I performed 5 of the 6 steps, just like the PDF instructed. Step 6 is not required to connect to the RIGOL DS1054Z (and I think I could have skipped step 4 and 5 as well, but I thought "why not?"), no harm, no foul:
There are six files to download from this page. YOU WILL NEED TO DOWNLOAD ALL SIX FILES!!
1) Instructions
2) NI 488 driver
3) NI VISA driver
4) LabView driver
5) SiLabs Driver
6) Isaac for Mac
ALWAYS MAKE A FULL BACKUP OF YOUR SYSTEM BEFORE DOING THESE KINDS OF "MAYBE IT WILL WORK" INSTALLS
These instructions (from the PDF) worked flawlessly, and I could see my RIGOL 1054Z in the NI-VISA utility console:
After that I knew I was "home free" and it was just a matter of time to get things started with macOS Catalina and the RIGOL.
I searched around for some "nice LabView-like" program which works on top of VISA, but everything I downloaded looked "not to my standards", so I decided to nix the idea of a nice GUI, and go for, as a starter, the python rigol-grab
https://github.com/rdpoor/rigol-grab
My MacOS running Catalina is running both python2 and python3, and we need PyVISA to continue this caper:
At first, I could not get this sample test program, from the GIT repo, to work:
>>> import pyvisa
>>> rm = pyvisa.ResourceManager()
>>> rm.list_resources()
('ASRL1::INSTR', 'ASRL2::INSTR', 'GPIB0::12::INSTR')
>>> inst = rm.open_resource('GPIB0::12::INSTR')
>>> print(inst.query("*IDN?"))
Could not get past the >>> import pyvisa
line, because my python could not find the module.
So, I went to the interactive python gizmo, and typed in help("modules")
and pyvisa
was missing, as expected.
However, when I tried the same routine using python3, there is was... yea... so I simply forced python to install pyvisa for python (python 2) as well as python3..... and of course, it worked.
So, with all of that behind me, and a few hours of quantum time passed, I closed the issue I opened on this matter at rigol-grab repo, and here is my first RIGOL 1054Z screen grab using python on macOS Catalina
Life is good... I have a brand new RIGOL 1054Z, which just arrived yesterday, and today I've managed to use a python program running on top of the NI-VISA python wrapper, PyVISA to capture the screen.
Now I need to put the probes on some cool waveforms, which I should create with Arduino, but who knows Today got a mail bag of 18 more electronic goodies from China, so it's easy to get distracted around here, especially since I can be easily bored and have a lot attention span from time to time, LOL