Real-time operating via Python

Question

So I am an inexperienced Python coder, with what I have gathered might be a rather complicated need. I am a cognitive scientist and I need precise stimulus display and butto

Answer 1

Python is not, by purist's standards, a real-time language- it has too many libraries and functions to be bare-bones fast. If you're already going through an OS though, as opposed to an embedded system, you've already lost a lot of true real time capability. (When I hear "real time" I think the time it takes VHDL code to flow through the wires of an FPGA. Other people use it to mean "I hit a button and it does something that is, from my slow human perspective, instantaneous". I'll assume you're using the latter interpretation of real time.)

By stimulus display and button press detection I assume you mean you have something (for example) like a trial where you show a person an image and have them click a button to identify the image or confirm that they've seen it- perhaps to test reaction speed. Unless you're worried about accuracy down to the millisecond (which should be negligible compared to the time for a human reaction) you would be able to do a test like this using python. To work on the GUI, look into Tkinter: http://www.pythonware.com/library/tkinter/introduction/. To work on the timing between stimulus and a button press, look at the time docs: http://docs.python.org/library/time.html

Good luck!