Welcome to QMI!

You are reading the documentation of QMI, the Quantum Measurement Framework.

What is it?

QMI is a Python 3 framework for controlling laboratory equipment. It is suitable for anything ranging from one-off scientific experiments to robust operational setups.

QMI is developed by QuTech to support advanced physics experiments involving quantum bits. However, other than its name and original purpose, there is nothing specifically quantum about QMI — it is potentially useful in any environment where monitoring and control of measurement equipment is needed.

Features

QMI has a number of nice features:

  • It is fully open source;

  • It is written in modern Python 3;

  • It is properly documented;

  • It is optimized for monitoring and control of complicated setups, distributed over multiple locations;

  • It supports instruments that encapsulate equipment under computer control. A number of instruments are provided out of the box, and it is relatively easy to add your own;

  • It supports tasks that encapsulate a (background) process that needs to run indefinitely;

  • It offers network transparency; instruments and tasks can be remotely started, stopped, monitored and controlled;

  • It is multi-platform. At QuTech, QMI is regularly used in both Linux and Windows, and running QMI on macOS is also possible.