TKinter - How to stop a loop with a stop button?

Question

I have this program which beeps every second until it\'s stopped. The problem is that after I press \"Start\" and the beeps starts, I cannot click the \"Stop\" button becaus

Answer 1

There are several things wrong with your code. First of all you shouldn't use time.sleep() in a Tkinter program because it interferes with the mainloop(). Instead one typically uses the universal widget method .after() to schedule a function to run after a specified delay.

Secondly you're not using global variables correctly. When you assign a value to a named variable in a function, it will create a local variable unless that name has been previous declared global. So for instance, your stop() function is creating a local variable named running and setting its value to 0, not changing the value of the global variable with the same name.

The previous rule doesn't apply to just referencing (reading) the current value of a variable. That is why it was OK to not have declared Freq and Dur globals in start().

Another problem is with the sec % 1 == 0 in your start() function. Any value % 1 is 0. To check odd/evenness use sec % 2.

Here's a working version which has also been reformatted to follow PEP 8 - Style Guide for Python Code more closely.

import Tkinter
import tkMessageBox
import time
import winsound

FREQ = 2500
DUR = 150

after_id = None
secs = 0

def beeper():
    global after_id
    global secs
    secs += 1
    if secs % 2 == 0:  # every other second
        winsound.Beep(FREQ, DUR)
    after_id = top.after(1000, beeper)  # check again in 1 second

def start():
    global secs
    secs = 0
    beeper()  # start repeated checking

def stop():
    global after_id
    if after_id:
        top.after_cancel(after_id)
        after_id = None

top = Tkinter.Tk()
top.title('MapAwareness')
top.geometry('200x100')

startButton = Tkinter.Button(top, height=2, width=20, text="Start",
                             command=start)
stopButton = Tkinter.Button(top, height=2, width=20, text="Stop",
                            command=stop)
startButton.pack()
stopButton.pack()
top.mainloop()