Hey Fabien,

See comments below and the bottom for my final changes. Please CC me in replies.

On 12/21/12 5:06 AM, lafont.fab...@gmail.com wrote:
Hello everyone,

I'm trying to plot live datas using matplotlib and PyQt. I need a
multithreaded program beacause I use time.sleep and it freeze completely
the app during that moment. I've tried that but it crash immediatly:

Do you get a seg. fault or some other error? I'm pretty sure I've helped you with this type of Qt application before, but I'll see what I can clear up.
from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui

import time

import sys

from matplotlib.backends.backend_qt4agg import FigureCanvasQTAgg as
FigureCanvas

from matplotlib.backends.backend_qt4agg import NavigationToolbar2QTAgg as
NavigationToolbar

from matplotlib.figure import Figure

# Subclassing QThread

# http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qthread.html

class Graph(FigureCanvas):

def __init__(self,parent):

self.fig = Figure()

self.ax = self.fig.add_subplot(111)

FigureCanvas.__init__(self, self.fig)

self.R1 = []

self.l_R1, = self.ax.plot([], self.R1,"-o")

self.fig.canvas.draw()

FigureCanvas.updateGeometry(self)

class ApplicationWindow(QtGui.QMainWindow):

"""Example main window"""

def __init__(self):

QtGui.QMainWindow.__init__(self)

self.main_widget = QtGui.QWidget(self)

vbl = QtGui.QGridLayout(self.main_widget)

qmc = Graph(self.main_widget)

vbl.addWidget(qmc,0,0,1,11)

self.setCentralWidget(self.main_widget)
First, a small thing, I'm not sure if this matters but I've always created layouts by doing:

   vbl = QtGui.QGridLayout()
   # addWidget
   self.main_widget.setLayout(vbl)

I got this pattern from the documentation:
http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/static/Docs/PyQt4/html/qwidget.html#setLayout

class AThread(QtCore.QThread):

def run(self):

count = 0

while count < 5:

time.sleep(1)

print "Increasing"

count += 1

aw.l_R1.set_data(count, count)
I don't approve of subclassing the "run" method of QThread, but what you have should work a little bit for now. I really don't approve of using a global in another thread affinity and I highly doubt this will work correctly. You should be using Qt signals to communicate between threads, but using signals you may have to get a little more complex with how you are using QThreads to free up the event loops.

You are also calling "aw.l_R1" which does not exist. You need to have a way to access the graph. As a quick hack I just set the graph to "self.qmc" and then in the run method I did "aw.qmc.l_R1.set_data(count, count)". You will also want to update the limits to show the new data as it comes in or set it to a certain range from the start. You will need to redraw the canvas every time you update it. You will likely run into problems in the future if you draw in a different thread from the GUI thread, but for some reason it works in your example.

I'm not sure if this was intended, but since you are not saving the previous "count" you are only plotting points not a line. One way to do this is if you want to keep the last N records (lets say N=200) then you can plot originally "self.ax.plot(numpy.arange(200), numpy.zeros(200))" and then update the y-data only like this "aw.qmc.set_ydata(<length 200 array of previous counts>)".

def usingQThread():

app = QtCore.QCoreApplication([])

thread = AThread()

thread.finished.connect(app.exit)

thread.start()

sys.exit(app.exec_())
I'm really confused at this point. How have you been calling this module? As "python test.py"? You are creating 2 QApplications, which isn't the easiest to follow. You should create 1 application, then make the window, then make the threads.

Another big thing is that when you run "thread.finished.connect(app.exit)" you are connecting the end of the thread to the app closing. Do you want the Application to completely close when the thread finishes (as you have it which I've never done so not sure if this will cause problems in more complex applications) or do you want the thread to stop, leaving the window open? The application would then close when the last window is closed.

if __name__ == "__main__":

#

  qApp = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)

aw = ApplicationWindow()

aw.showMaximized()

usingQThread()

sys.exit(qApp.exec_())

I removed "usingQThread" method and moved that logic to the if statement so it now looks like this:

   if __name__ == "__main__":
        qApp = QtGui.QApplication([" "])
        aw = ApplicationWindow()
        aw.showMaximized()
        thread = AThread()
        thread.finished.connect(qApp.exit)
        thread.start()
        sys.exit(qApp.exec_())


I also added a "self.qmc = qmc" in the ApplicationWindow and forced the y-limits in the Graph.__init__ method using the following:

   self.ax.set_xlim(-1, 6)
   self.ax.set_ylim(-1, 6)

Then in the run method the last 2 lines in the while loop now say:

     aw.qmc.l_R1.set_data(count, count)
     aw.qmc.draw()


This got it running for me, although it had the plotting points problem I mentioned earlier. Hopefully this will get you somewhere. But I can not stress enough that you need to research QThreads and how they should be used correctly and how threads work in general. As I noted above you should not be drawing in non-GUI threads and you should not be magically using a global variable that lives in another thread (use signals and slots). This is bad practice and will likely lead to obscure errors and a lot of headache when you're short on time (assuming this is for a work project like mine was).

Good luck.

-Dave

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