Welcome to the Joulescope™ User Interface software repo! Joulescope is an affordable, precision energy analyzer that enables you to build better products. Joulescope™ accurately and simultaneously measures the voltage and current supplied to your target device, and it then computes power and energy. For more information on Joulescope, see www.joulescope.com.

This repository contains the Joulescope graphical User Interface (UI). The UI runs on a host computer and communicates with the Joulescope device over USB. The application source code is available at https://github.com/jetperch/pyjoulescope_ui.

The software is highly configurable. Here is the Multimeter view on Windows 11:

And here is the Oscilloscope view on Windows 11:

For more information, see:

• Tips: for using the UI.
• Translations and locale
• Plugins: Using and developing UI plugins.
• Changelog: list of changes by release
• Future features
• Contributing
• Code of Conduct
• Developer notes
• PubSub

Quick start using official distribution

We provide official distributions for Windows, macOS and Ubuntu 22.04LTS.

Visit the main download page for the latest stable build.

You can download the latest and previous alpha, beta, and stable builds here.

Run as python package

The Joulescope UI is a python package which you can install for pypi or run directly from source.

Install Python

The Joulescope User Interface requires Python 3.9 or newer. We recommend Python 3.11. Install Python 3.9+ on your system and then verify your python version at the terminal or command line:

> python -VV
Python 3.11.4 (tags/v3.11.4:d2340ef, Jun  7 2023, 05:45:37) [MSC v.1934 64 bit (AMD64)]

Ensure that you have Python 3.9 or newer and 64-bit. For macOS, you can also use Homebrew to install python.

Configure virtualenv [optional]

Although not required, using virtualenv avoids dependency conflicts, especially if you use your python installation for other programs. Using virtualenv ensures that the Joulescope software has the right dependencies without changing the rest of your system.

For Windows:

Install virtualenv and create a new virtual environment:

python -v venv c:\venv\joulescope

Activate the virtual environment whenever you start a new terminal:

c:\venv\joulescope\Scripts\activate

For POSIX including (Linux, macOS):

Install virtualenv and create a new virtual environment:

python -m venv ~/venv/joulescope

Activate the virtual environment whenever you start a new terminal:

. ~/venv/joulescope/bin/activate

Install using pypi

Installation from pypi is easy:

python -m pip install -U --upgrade-strategy=eager joulescope_ui

If you just want to run the latest released version of the UI.

For Linux, you need to perform additional steps. Here are steps for Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libudev-dev libxcb-cursor0
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jetperch/joulescope_driver/main/99-joulescope.rules
sudo cp 99-joulescope.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

If you receive the error: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found, you need to install additional dependencies. First identify the missing dependencies:

export QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1
python3 -m joulescope_ui

Then install them using apt or your distribution's package manager. The Joulescope UI uses Qt6, and you can find the Qt6 dependencies here.

Run

Whenever you want to run the Joulescope UI:

python -m joulescope_ui

Depending upon your system, you may need to replace "python" with "python3" or the full path to your python executable.

The joulescope package also contains an executable, so you can often type:

joulescope ui

Developer Howto

Clone and configure the Joulescope UI from the terminal or command line:

git clone https://github.com/jetperch/pyjoulescope_ui.git
cd pyjoulescope_ui
python -m pip install -U --upgrade-strategy eager -r requirements.txt

Build the QT resources:

python setup.py sdist

As long as the current directory is the source directory, you can run:

python -m joulescope_ui

If you want to run from another directory, you will need to add the source to your PYTHONPATH environment variable.

Windows using command prompt:

set PYTHONPATH={C:\path\to\repos}\pyjoulescope_ui

Windows using PowerShell:

$env:PYTHONPATH = "{C:\path\to\repos}\pyjoulescope_ui"

POSIX shells (most Linux, macOS with homebrew):

export PYTHONPATH={path/to/repos}/pyjoulescope_ui

To also distribute the UI on macOS, you need to install XCode and then configure node. If using homebrew:

brew install node
npm install

You will also need to install the signing certificate using Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.

If you also want to simultaneously develop the Joulescope UI and the Joulescope driver, you can include the joulescope_driver in your PYTHONPATH and build in place:

pip3 uninstall joulescope
cd {path/to/repos}
git clone https://github.com/jetperch/joulescope_driver.git
cd joulescope_driver
pip3 install -U -r requirements.txt
python setup.py build_ext --inplace && python -m unittest
git clone https://github.com/jetperch/pyjoulescope.git
cd pyjoulescope
pip3 install -U -r requirements.txt    
python setup.py build_ext --inplace && python -m unittest

You should then modify your python path to find both the UI and driver source paths. On Windows:

set PYTHONPATH={C:\path\to\repos}\joulescope_driver;C:\path\to\repos}\pyjoulescope;{C:\path\to\repos}\pyjoulescope_ui

and on POSIX (Linux, Mac OS X with homebrew):

export PYTHONPATH={path/to/repos}/pyjoulescope:{path/to/repos}/pyjoulescope_ui

License

All pyjoulescope_ui code is released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. See the License File for details.