As promised in the last blog post, I spent some time developing a derive macro that allows deriving how new types will be written to and read from an instrument. This blog post is about these changes, how they work, and how they still need to be improved.
It has been a few weeks since my last post. Since then I have focused on the async interface, a note on this at the end of this blog post, and on integrating a new instrument using instrumentRs v0.2.0. Here are my findings on writing a more complex driver.
In the last blogpost
we discussed design ideas for instrumentRs v0.2.0.
Here, I will mainly focus on
the mock interface for testing instruments drivers
developed using instrumenRs v0.2.0.
If you haven't already done so,
it is highly recommended that you read the last blogpost first
for context.
Over the years I have written many drivers to control scientific equipment. These were mostly in python using the wonderful instrumentkit. As my tech stack has mostly moved to Rust however, I have missed a consistent, simple-to-use way to write instrument drivers.
This post discusses a very rough idea on how such an improved driver kit might look like in Rust. In addition to inspiration from instrumentkit, a lot of inspiration is also taken from the fantastic device-driver tool.
One of my favorite radio shows is Radiolab, which always presents the listener with an interesting scientific question from across the board. In a recent rerun, Radiolab discussed Stochasticity. Something struck me as odd...
Writing is an important part of everybody's scientific work. I have taken several writing courses over the years. My approach to writing has been shaped by these courses with some additional experience. Is it great now? Surely not, but better than it used to be! Here are some of my pointers.
Assume the following thought experiment: The Earth circling the Sun at a cozy distance of 1 AU (around 150 million km) suddenly stands still and doesn't move anymore. The only force left on the Earth is now the Sun's gravitational pull. How long will it be until we crash into the Sun?
Let's calculate how many atoms are in a SiC stardust grain and use python to do so!