Real-time graphs

I've trolled the lists, FAQs, and Net as a whole, but
can't find anything definitive to answer this.

We're looking for real-time graph capability (bar,
line, etc), so that we can display telemetry from a
robot system. There are a bunch of packages out
there, but many seem to provide only static graphs
(e.g. for scientific, financial data, etc). Does
anyone currently display real-time telemetry using
Python? Can anyone provide any suggestions?

TIA
Stephen

[snrkiwi-lists]

Thanks for the info, all. It is certainly helping! Collating it all,
and given our current setup and requirements (not web based, no Java,
wxPython, lots of real time graphs per screen, Mac OS X and Linux), it
seems only a couple of possibilities stand out.

- VPython
- matplotlib

Having said that, neither of these appeared to come with examples with
wxPython, but I guess you can't ask for everything! :-)

Does anyone have any direct experience with either of these inside of
wxPython? It appears that matplotlib will directly work with wxPython,
not so for VPython?

If we were using Tkinter, we might have other options apparently. I
also have noticed a couple of other packages that no-one noted here

- DISLIN
- pgplot

Does anyone have any experience with these in a wxPython setting?

TIA

[Tom]

I do lab instrument programming - moving stages, polling sensors &
controlling instruments. My GUIs have lots of visual feedback - live
charts, buttons, indicators, meters, gauges. I use wxPython for the
GUI framework, python+numeric for lots of the number
crunching/analysis, and swig for wrapping hardware drivers/dlls. For
the gauge, plot, and button widgets, I use the national instruments
"measuremen t studio" activex objects through wxPython activex hosting.
This works well and was very easy - esp. if you use the CVS BOA
constructor IDE. Of course it requires that you buy the NI
measurement studio for Visual basic. I already had it because I used
to use labview/labwindows for this stuff. It will cost you like $800
for just the widgets (no labview) if I recall correctly.

There are many other commercial visual basic/activex widget sets for
lab instrumentation/process monitoring. Take your pick. Some will be
cheaper/faster/better I'm sure.

the disadvantage of this approach is that 1) costs money 2) the vendor
will probably only offer VB support, not Python 3) windows only. None
of these are a problem for me, since most hardware drivers are windows
only anyway.

Some day some one will make a great lightweight plotting widget that
will drop right into wxpython no problem. I might even do this. But
it hasn't happened yet. THere are a hundred plotting packages that
shoehorn into wxpython - scipy/chaco, NCARgraphics, and a lot more
I've tried and forgotten. They are all too slow, too immature, or too
much trouble to use. But wxPython works very well with Activex
widgets. They look really good, are fast, and the wrapped widget
classes are very pythonic to program.

<sn***********@ yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<ma******* *************** *************** *@python.org>.. .

I've trolled the lists, FAQs, and Net as a whole, but
can't find anything definitive to answer this.

We're looking for real-time graph capability (bar,
line, etc), so that we can display telemetry from a
robot system. There are a bunch of packages out
there, but many seem to provide only static graphs
(e.g. for scientific, financial data, etc). Does
anyone currently display real-time telemetry using
Python? Can anyone provide any suggestions?

TIA
Stephen

[Fernando Perez]

sn***********@y ahoo.com wrote:

I've trolled the lists, FAQs, and Net as a whole, but
can't find anything definitive to answer this.

We're looking for real-time graph capability (bar,
line, etc), so that we can display telemetry from a
robot system. There are a bunch of packages out
there, but many seem to provide only static graphs
(e.g. for scientific, financial data, etc). Does
anyone currently display real-time telemetry using
Python? Can anyone provide any suggestions?

I suspect matplotlib will be your best choice, but you might also check out
HippoDraw (google for it). It's Qt-based, designed to read instrument data at
SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator). I've seen demos of it, and it looked very
good.

Best,

f