[Discuss-gnuradio] Updates to gr-qtgui

[Tom Rondeau]

Hi list,

I wanted to update everyone that I will be updating gr-qtgui in the master branch tomorrow. I wanted to warn everyone that this WILL change the API.

These changes in the code are mostly related to the stability of the qtgui interface and prevents the segmentation fault that we were seeing before. It does not address some of the performance issues we have discussed; those are still to come.

I ended up cleaning up some of the cruft in the code, and I removed any trace of the former 3D waterfall. I also got rid of most of calls to OpenGL-based stuff. I couldn't completely get rid of this, because some of the calls to QWT don't work without linking against libQtOpenGL.

The main changes in the API are that I took out the args in the constructors to turn on/off the 3D waterfall and the OpenGL flag. If you have been doing anything with the QtGui sinks, watch out for this change, as it will affect how your display works. If you have been using the QtGui interface in GRC, you should be fine, as the GRC files have all been updated to work with the new interface.

Another change is that I have exposed the redraw update time through Python. This means that you can use the "set_update_time(double)" method on a QtGui sink in Python to set the refresh rate of the plots. This won't reduce the overhead too much right now, since many of the math is computed regardless of the update time. This is on my list of improvements in the next round.

If you are up for helping me vet this, you can find it as the "qtgui" branch on my github account:

git://github.com/trondeau/gnuradio.git

If you find that it's not working for you or still producing segmentation faults on close, please let me know (and let me know your OS, CPU, and any other relevant features you can think of). I have run it on a few machines and various VMs, but it's a limited set. You can try the gr-qtgui/apps/pyqt_example_c.py as a test.

Thanks,

Tom