Fast plotting?

[William Park]

Russell E. Owen <rowen at cesmail.net> wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a fast cross-platform plotting package for 2-D 
> plots?
> 
> Our situation:
> We are driving an instrument that outputs data at 20Hz. Control is via 
> an existing Tkinter application (which is being extended for this new 
> instrument) that runs on unix, mac and windows. We wish to update 5-10 
> summary plots at approximately 2 Hz and will be offering controls to 
> control the instrument and the plots, preferably (but not necessarily) 
> mixed in with the plots.

That's 10-20 plots per second.  The only GUI plotter that I know is
'gnuplot', and I don't know if it will spit out anything at 10-20Hz.
For character plots (like old days terminal), it has speed but ugly to
look at.

> 
> Ideally the package would create plots in the Tkinter application. But 
> we realize we're unlikely to get the speed we need that way. So we are 
> willing to have the Tkinter app send data to the plotting package  (e.g. 
> via a socket) and have it display the plots in a separate process.
> 
> We started out with matplotlib, which is a wonderful package (and well 
> integrated with most or all GUI toolkits). Unfortunately it is just too 
> slow -- at least when driving plots integrated with the Tkinter app. (It  
> is getting faster and so are computers, so at some point this will be a 
> great way to go. But for now...)
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> -- Russell

-- 
William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>, Toronto, Canada
Slackware Linux -- because it works.