chore(release): 5.6.0

[little-did-I-know]

Cuts 5.6.0. MINOR — the release is entirely fixes plus one new internal module (scpi_control.units), with one new optional parameter. Nothing broke: no renames, no removed names, no required-parameter changes.

Contents

Six ### Fixed entries, from PR #115 (five) and PR #116 (one).

Three silent failures in the automation capture path (#115) — all from the 2026-07-22 adversarial audit, all re-verified against main before any code was written:

• save_waveform rejected npz and h5, two of the four format names its own docstrings list — one of them start_continuous_capture's default. An overnight run with default arguments wrote nothing, and four shipped examples were broken the same way. The same spellings were already valid as file extensions via auto-detect, which is what produced the inconsistency.
• batch_capture raised TypeError on the SI-string scales its own docstring documents and its example copies verbatim, discarding every capture already taken. Now parsed by the new scpi_control/units.py.
• capture_single slept a flat 0.5 s instead of polling acquisition_status(), so on a slow timebase it returned the previous acquisition — which batch_capture then recorded under the new config's label. Wrong data, correctly formatted, no warning.

Plus two changes that came out of reviewing those: capture_single no longer clobbers a user-configured NORM trigger mode (disclosed in its docstring, not buried), and parse_si_value scales by shifting the decimal exponent so '10us' is exactly 1e-05 rather than reaching the instrument as TDIV 9.999999999999999e-06.

One documentation fix (#116) — the README screenshot used a repository-relative path, so it silently failed to load on PyPI while rendering fine on GitHub. Now an absolute raw URL, matching what the README's other six images already did.

Release mechanics

• pyproject.toml and scpi_control/__init__.py bumped 5.5.0 → 5.6.0 (both hand-maintained; tests/test_version_consistency.py enforces they agree)
• ## [5.6.0] - 2026-07-26 header inserted under ## [Unreleased]
• docs/about/changelog.md re-synced to CHANGELOG.md — byte-identical hand-maintained mirrors that nothing in the suite enforces, so this is a manual step every release
• PyPI summary re-checked at 387 characters, inside the hard 512 cap that failed the v3.2.0 publish

Verification

• Full suite 1941 passed, 19 skipped, 0 failed
• black --check --line-length 200 scpi_control/ examples/ clean (180 files); flake8 --select=E9,F63,F7,F82 = 0

Note

The README screenshot fix takes effect on this release's PyPI page. The 5.5.0 page keeps the broken image — PyPI project pages are immutable per release.

After merge: tag v5.6.0 and publish the GitHub release, which triggers the build/PyPI/docs workflow.