(I don’t mean to talk to myself, but…)
I don’t have my experiment here at the moment, but I’m wondering whether going into the lib and changing
prms = self.exp.getComponentFromName(bytes(compName)).params
to
prms = self.exp.getComponentFromName(bytes(compName, "utf-8")).params
would do the trick. As far as I can tell Python 3.6 needs more specificity for encoding a bytes object.