[Matplotlib-users] Real-time graph, redrawing a changing Y axis

[John Ladasky]

Hi Jody,

Thanks for your reply.  I'm aware of Matplotlib's animation API.  I'm not
sure that it would help me.

As far as I can tell, the purpose of animation.FuncAnimation() is to
connect a data generating function to the update function of a MPL object,
and to drive it all with a timer.  It's an event loop, for people who
aren't already writing event-driven code (which I am, I have 1,200 lines of
mostly-working PyQt5).  What actually gets done in the MPL update method is
what I think is important to me.  I want to change only what needs to be
changed.

My approach is best described by this article:

http://bastibe.de/2013-05-30-speeding-up-matplotlib.html

The article is a few years old, I know.  Still, using the advice I found in
articles like this one, I limited redrawing, and everything updates in
under 10 milliseconds, a 15-fold improvement over my original
redraw-everything approach. In total, I have five live graphs on the
screen. It's only this one self-adjusting time series graph that is
misbehaving for me.

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 3:36 PM, Jody Klymak <jklymak at uvic.ca> wrote:

>
> On Jun 29, 2016, at  15:12 PM, John Ladasky <jladasky at itu.edu> wrote:
>
> I am using MPL 1.4.2, Python 3.4, and Ubuntu 15.04.  I am developing a
> program which displays real-time data.  On each update cycle, the graph
> needs to adjust the y-axis scale.  I have code that mostly works, but when
> it re-renders the y-axis, it is not completely erasing the old one.  I get
> tick labels written on top of each other, until everything is an unreadable
> smear, like this:
>
>
> I think thats because `redraw_in_frame()` doesn’t update any of the axes
> data…
>
> Have you looked into the animation API?  Its meant for this sort of thing,
> and seems pretty snappy.  Most of what you are doing below would just go
> into the `animate` function.
>
> http://matplotlib.org/examples/animation/simple_anim.html
>
> Cheers,   Jody
>
>
>
>
> <For matplotlib-users.png>
>
> Here is the relevant part of my update method:
>
> self.plot.set_data(self.x[:size], self.y[:size])
> lo = self.y[:size].min()
> hi = self.y[:size].max()
> if hi - lo > 150:
>     self.ax.set_ylim(lo-25, hi+25)
> else:
>     mid = self.y[:size].mean()
>     self.ax.set_ylim(mid-100, mid+100)
> self.ax.relim()
> self.ax.autoscale_view(None, False, True)
> self.ax.redraw_in_frame()
> # Something which erases the Y axis should go here?
> self.ax.get_yaxis().draw(self.parent.get_renderer())
>
>
> I think that the details of setting the Y limits are unimportant, but I've
> included that code anyway, so that you can see my set_data() method call at
> the top, and you can also see that I'm continually adjusting the Y range to
> track the data.
>
> I think that I am searching for a method in the axis class which would
> erase the previously drawn tick marks and labels.  So far, I haven't found
> one.  It would replace the comment line in my code.
>
> I am trying to avoid redrawing the entire canvas on which this plot is
> embedded, since there are several other live data plots besides the one I
> have shown. The first version of my program did a full redraw, and it took
> over 150 milliseconds to complete an update call.  That's too slow for my
> needs.
>
> Thanks for any help you can provide!
>
> --
> *John J. Ladasky Jr., Ph.D.*
> *Research Scientist*
> *International Technological University*
> *2711 N. First St, San Jose, CA 95134 USA*
> _______________________________________________
> Matplotlib-users mailing list
> Matplotlib-users at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/matplotlib-users
>
>
>


-- 
*John J. Ladasky Jr., Ph.D.*
*Research Scientist*
*International Technological University*
*2711 N. First St, San Jose, CA 95134 USA*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/matplotlib-users/attachments/20160629/4007b88e/attachment-0001.html>