README for Lab::Measurement
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lab::Measurement allows to perform test and measurement tasks with Perl scripts.
It provides an interface to several instrumentation control backends, as e.g.
LinuxGPIB or National Instruments' NI-VISA library. Dedicated instrument driver
classes relieve the user from taking care for internal details.

See https://www.labmeasurement.de/ for further information.

If you've used Lab::Measurement, please cite our article on it in your resulting
publications (e.g., in the acknowledgments section)!

  S. Reinhardt, C. Butschkow, S. Geissler, A. Dirnaichner, F. Olbrich, C. Lane,
  D. Schröer, and A. K. Hüttel, "Lab::Measurement - a portable and extensible
  framework for controlling lab equipment and conducting measurements",
  Computer Physics Communications 234, 216 (2019); doi:10.1016/j.cpc.2018.07.024


INSTALLATION
=========================

The Lab::Measurement package is distributed on the Comprehensive Perl Archive
Network (CPAN). A general introduction to the installation of CPAN modules is
provided in [1]. Essentially, Lab::Measurement can be installed by any CPAN
client software distributed for Perl.

An example using the cpanminus CPAN client would be to use the commands

1) optionally, to download and install cpanminus if not present on the system
 $ cpan App::cpanminus

2) to download and install Lab::Measurement and its dependencies
 $ cpanm Lab::Measurement

at the command-line prompt (e.g. bash on Linux or cmd.exe on MS Windows). The
CPAN client will download and install Lab::Measurement from CPAN and will
optionally verify the installation by running the module's unit tests.

Perl installation variants may additionally provide graphical installers for
accessing CPAN (e.g., ActivePerl for Windows) or integrate installation of Perl
modules into the package management of the operating system (e.g.,
Lab::Measurement is packaged for Gentoo Linux).

Depending on the used hardware, additional Perl back-end modules such as
LinuxGPIB, Lab::VISA, or Lab::VXI11 may be needed on your system. Back-end
specific documentation and installation instructions are provided in [2].


USAGE
=========================

Lab::Measurement is a library of Perl modules, for use by measurement scripts.
Any such Perl script is executed by running

 $ perl script.pl

with the command-line prompt.

Examples of measurement scripts using the Lab::Measurement module libraries can
be found in the Lab::Measurement tutorial [3]. It can also be read after
Lab::Measurement installation by running on the command-line

 $ perldoc Lab::Measurement::Tutorial


REFERENCES
=========================

[1] http://www.cpan.org/modules/INSTALL.html
[2] https://metacpan.org/pod/Lab::Measurement::Backends
[3] https://metacpan.org/pod/Lab::Measurement::Tutorial


COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE
=========================

Copyright (C) 2004-2022 the Lab::Measurement team
  For a detailed list of authors, please see the Git commit log.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.3 or, at your option, any
later version of Perl 5 you may have available.

With the current license terms of Perl this means you have the choice of any
version of the GNU General Public License or of the Artistic License. See
COPYING, COPYING.GPL-2, and COPYING.Artistic for the details.
