GUI with gauges in python

[Zero999]

GUIs.  Just beware.  GUIs are the biggest time sink in software.  They are fiddly and even with good GUI tools tedious.  There is a reason a lot of software just abandoned desktop GUIs and went to serverside Web app.  Even there it's not easy, just not bound by the infinite number of user platform variations.

This is how much I love writing GUIs.  This is the best UI I have for my home automation systems.  It's MqttExplorer

(Attachment Link)

Whatever happened to simple drag and drop GUI design? Back in the day, I occasionally used Visual Basic to write the odd GUI program and found it really easy to use. Isn't there anything more modern which also works on other platforms than Windows?

[Simon]

It's been more about getting a GUI and other non GUI code like the CAN bus module to play together although this looks like it may become the serial module instead. I knew that OSes are not real time but I thought a slimmed down version of linux on 4x 2.4 GHz processors would do better than 3ms .

It won't really matter for my end application of making a machine HMI but for diagnostics it would be nice to have good timestamping. The Bosch M CAN controller that is in any decent microcontroller (not the cheap ST shit) will give a timestamp in CAN bus bit times so potentially to the µs at 1Mbaud.

This also makes it more universal as it can run on any computer with a serial port. This was my original intention but I wanted to get something working a bit more quickly than the time it will take to write the code for a micro controller and get a board spun.

[tggzzz]

It's been more about getting a GUI and other non GUI code like the CAN bus module to play together although this looks like it may become the serial module instead. I knew that OSes are not real time but I thought a slimmed down version of linux on 4x 2.4 GHz processors would do better than 3ms .

Realtime != fast.
Realtime == predictable timing limits. (Soft => statistics, hard => never exceed)

But you know that.

[Simon]

Well in the end I don't need such precise timings. But I will need to make a bespoke PCB for the CAN controller so it would not be too far out of order to use a micro like my current PIC32CX that has 2 M_CAN controllers built in and use it as my own serial to CAN bus adapter, then I have the power of real time with a 120 MHz M4F processor I can probably do plenty of pre-processing rather than have to send everything over the serial port so the PC then becomes more of a display head.

[xvr]

Whatever happened to simple drag and drop GUI design?

Qt includes QtDesigner, a very convenient tool for creating GUI.
It also includes Qt Design Studio (but it's QML-oriented, so I haven't tried it).

[Simon]

I played with it a bit but it felt like progress was excruciatingly slow so opted for the faster route. I never did manage to get a file from QT design studio to open in QT Creator, probably something simple that is not in any of their documentation. I mean it took 3 months of trying to understand how to get a number from a potential C++ program to the QML side of things, turned out to be really simple and yet this very obviously necessary thing was scarcely explained.