The challenge seemed pretty easy, to assemble an easy demo with simple example :
Thus, the added value resided in letting people fill in the min/max/step information for the relevant dimensions.
Without the colorbar I would have just been slightly annoyed by the slowness of the reaction of matplotlib as a GUI, but the colorbar posed a new challenge because it would either stack for each drawing or make plt.clf/ax.cla erase too much (see this great resource on when to use cla/clf in matplotlib).
So … I tried python-tk with matplotlib knowing all too well that you can embed natively matplotlib in tkinter interface.
And since it was working I kept it.
Here is a screenshot of the interface :
WARNING this code should not be let in inventive hands (such as bored teenagers) because there is an evil eval; it requires to be in care of consenting adults.
Some highlights of the code :
- bidir python-tk requires setting the Popen PIPEs to non blocking and using select.select on the output
- matplotlib is unusable in non blocking mode : once matplotlib has the focus you need to destroy it to plot another function
- from np import * is evil, but it let you have access to all array oriented math function (sin, cos, exp, …)
This said, we have a pretty compact code of 128 lines of code that is pretty more reactive than using matplolib’s widget for a 3D ploter.
