using matplotlib or pyqtgraph to graph real time data

Question

I have devices connected to my serial port and I need to poll them and then display that data in a plot. I currently have this working (slowly) using matplotlib. I could h

Answer 1

I would suggest Chaco "... a package for building interactive and custom 2-D plots and visualizations." It can be integrated in Qt apps, though you can probably get higher frame rates from PyQwt.

I've actually used it to write an "app" (that's too big a word: it's not very fancy and it all fits in ~200 LOC) that gets data from a serial port and draws it (20 lines at over 20 fps, 50 at 15 fps, at full screen in my laptop).

Chaco documentation or online help weren't as comprehensive as matplotlib's, but I guess it will have improved and at any rate it was enough for me.

As a general advice, avoid drawing everything at every frame, ie., use the .set_data methods in both matplotlib and chaco. Also, here in stackoverflow there are some questions about making matplotlib faster.