Week #18 - May 23rd to May 29th - GUI Progress Update Website

This week was a lot of work for programming the GUI. The original thought was to program with Tkinter, but that proved to be very time consuming with the amount of code that was required for even basic layouts, so we decided to switch over to Qt for designing the GUI. Bryan recommended the idea to try it out, and it has actually helped take care of the more remedial things when it comes to GUI programming. We are utilizing the Qt designer (Try Qt | Develop Applications and Embedded Systems | Qt) to create the .ui forms that are then converted into python .py files. This method of created the layout has many benefits over hard coding. The most important benefit is that we can see what is being created and and easily make changes as the design requires it.

So far the main window primary buttons have been created and can open up the technician mode and driver mode. From either of those two modes we can open up a signals select form that allow for up to 6 signals to be selected form the *.dbc file that has been loaded.

I have done some prelimary testing to actualy acquire the CAN signals, and ran across a problem with how to actually capture the signals and still alow the Main GUI to function. It appears after a lot of research that I will need to use some kind of "listener" or "notifier" to run in the background and collect the incoming signal so that it can be processed and displayed to the user.

The process that will be used to collect signals in the background will be the same process used for the GPIO so the work put forth on this effort will streamline the GPIO process. Much of these methods are actually being done for the first time and there are not a lot of resources available to help implement CAN signal receiving in an application like this using Python.

I also did a short video of the current application with some of the important features operating and utilizing the larger buttons that we discussed during last week's meeting. This video is included below. The chart signals is just a demo sin wave at this point for testing purposes. When I can configure the CAN inputs to work correctly then I will be able to incorporate the signals into the chart.