Real-time graphs

[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
"measurement 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.

<snrkiwi-lists at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.463.1084375754.25742.python-list at 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