GUI Button hold down - tkinter

Question

I\'m trying to do a GUI in python to control my robotic car. My question is how I do a function that determine a hold down button. I want to move the car when the button is

Answer 1

Building on Bryan Oakley's answer of using flags to simulate a press and hold button. The problem is that you can't have any while loops in your tkinter application to say while running move car forward.

Which is why I suggest using threads. This way you can have a while loop running in the background checking if the car should be moving foward.

from threading import Thread
from Tkinter import *    

running = False
root = Tk()

def start_motor(event):
    global running
    print("starting motor...")
    running = True

def stop_motor(event):
    global running
    running = False
    print("stopping motor...")

def move_forward():
    while True: # Thread will run infinitely in the background
        if running:
            print("Car is moving forward...\n")

button = Button(root, text ="forward")
button.pack(side=LEFT)
button.bind('',start_motor)
button.bind('',stop_motor)

# Create and start the new thread
t = Thread(target = move_forward, args = ())
t.start()

root.mainloop()