Fast plotting?

[Patrick Ellis]

William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca> typed:
> 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

disipyl is a wrapper around dislin. It includes a class that lets plots
appear inside tkinter frames. I did a quick test and the first demo plot
(run tkdisipyl.py) of a 180 point sine and cosine plotted at over 100 Hz.

http://kim.bio.upenn.edu/~pmagwene/disipyl.html
http://www.mps.mpg.de/dislin/