The pypsucurvetrace curve tracer

pypsucurvetrace is a software toolbox for «curve tracing» of electronic components like transistors or vacuum tubes. It uses standard off-the-shelf programmable power supplies (PSUs) to apply predefined voltages to the device under test (DUT) and to determine the corresponding currents flowing through the DUT.

pypsucurvetrace provides the following command-line tools:

• curvetrace controls the PSUs, records the DUT «curve data», and saves it to a data file. The curvetrace program can also control the DUT temperature during curve tracing using an optional heater block.

• curveplot produces high-quality plots of the curve data.

• curveprocess determines characteristic DUT parameters from the curve data (operating points, gain, output conductance).

• curvematch calculates the «difference between two curve sets» to help finding parts with similar curves (part matching).

• curveconvert convert data files from other curve tracers to pypsucurvetrace format.

The pypsucurvetrace tools are written in Python 3 and will therefore work on all computers running a modern operating system.

Contents

• Installation
• The curvetrace program
• The curveplot program
• The curveprocess program
• The curvematch program
• The curveconvert program
• Supported power supplies
• Heater Block
• Examples

Note

• pypsucurvetrace is free software and uses the GPL-3 license (see LICENSE.txt or http://www.gnu.org/licenses). The Routed Gothic and National Park fonts are licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL). The FreeSans font is licensed under the GPL-3 License.

• Report issues and bugs here

• Discussion thread about curve tracing with pypsucurvetrace.

• The pypsucurvetrace code and this documentation are under construction, and are managed at GitHub.