Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] wxPython 3.0 breaks wxGUI

[Tom Rondeau]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 4:36 PM, Iain Young, G7III <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Folks,

Sorry to be late with my two penneth, but I am still in catch up mode
from vacation.

On 13/06/14 03:52, Marcus D. Leech wrote:

On 06/12/2014 10:43 PM, Tom Rondeau wrote:

In one sense, this is a low priority because we are moving away from
using the wx sinks in favor of the qt sinks. Still, for now, most of
our examples are base on wx, so we will need this to work for a little
bit longer.

Tom

Tom, it's not just the examples.  It's a significant base of "3rd party"
applications.   If you make WX go away without having some kind of
   uber-smooth transition plan, then the bad taste left by the 3.6 to
3.7 transition will be remembered, and it won't be pretty.

I have some concerns of my own here. I'll admit that most of the QT GUI
sinks look "cuter", (and in some cases work better). I do use both,
depending on what I need.

The one where the WX GUI wins for my use is the (Non GL) version of the
WX Waterfall vs the QT Waterfall. It's raw simplicity to show me what I
need (often did I get the filters right...)

Even playing with the QT Waterfall's settings, autoscale, bin size etc,
it never quite seems as "easy" to spot signals in it, esp weaker ones.
It's probably just levels that I'm feeding it, but the WX Waterfall works better in this regard for me.

If there would be a way (within GRC) to turn off all the decoration
(Time, Intensity, Frequency Axis labels etc), so we just have the raw
waterfall, I'd love that, as things like the QT Time Sink work way
better than the WX equivalent.

Also, the QT version seems limited to auto scaling or not. On the WX
version I can set my own Dynamic Range, Reference Level, and Reference Scales should I decide to.

BTW I think I found a bug. When you first fire the QT Waterfall GUI up,
and select "Multi-Colour" colour map, it doesn't work. Select another
colour map, and then select the multi-colour map, and it's fine.


Iain

Thanks for the feedback.

I can see a use for turning off the decorations in the waterfall plot. I'd hope that it'd be a simple function call to just alter the QwtPlot attributes for these things. Then, it'd simply be another menu item to toggle it on/off like the other menu features (like turning the grid on/off).

And I agree about the dynamic range settings. The qtsink itself allows you to set the min/max values. We really should make those settings available to the user in the waterfall sink, too. I believe the accessor to do that is available in the class and needs to be exposed in GRC and in the drop-down menu settings.

As for the multi-color map, that's the default map. So clicking it won't change anything since you're just selecting the current setting. If you go to the 'config' tab of the properties box, you should be able to set different color maps as the defaults.

Tom