Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] A few questions regarding QT GUI development

[Tom Rondeau]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 9:01 AM, George Hadley <address@hidden> wrote:

Greetings all,

        I recently began using gnuradio and GRC with a pair of USRPs. It's my understanding that plans are underway to ultimately remove WX in v3.9 as a GUI option from gnuradio, and replace it with QT. It's also my understanding that QT GUI development is underway in future versions of gnuradio. I'm interested in attempting to help develop for gnuradio and have forked a copy of the source from github.

Adding a bit to what Marcus said.

 

        With that in mind, I have a few questions:

1. Who is involved with QT GUI development for gnuradio?

Mostly, but not solely, me. More people working on this feature would be nice.

 

1. What future improvements, especially functionality related, are planned for gnuradio QT? All I have been able to find in the 3.8.0 roadmap is that grc will "introduce a QT version of GRC" (what does that mean?) and that gr-qtgui will be switching examples to use gr-qtgui instead of gr-wxgui. Functionality I'm most interested in includes X/Y mode for the QT GUI Time Sink and the ability to pause the output of the Time, Frequency, and Waterfall sinks (as is available via the "Stop" button in the WX counterparts.
   

We have plans to discuss the features we need next week at our hackfest. There are really two that come to mind that need attention.

The first is a strip-chart feature of the time plots (instead of waiting for a full number of samples, this would plot any new samples immediately and move the graph to the right -- used for slow signals mainly). The second is a persistence mode in the time plots.

The X/Y mode would be nice, sure, but it's basically what the Constellation plot does.

And we have already switched all GNU Radio example to QT instead of WX. That happened a while ago, but I guess that info still persists on the wiki (which page? It should be amended).

As Marcus pointed out, click the middle mouse button (or whatever's equivalent button 3 on your system). That menu has most of the instrumentation that's available in WX, just as a menu instead of the instrumentation panel. Including the ability to stop and save images.

 

1. In looking over the WX and QT GUI options, I personally prefer the layout and functionality of the WX GUI components (specifically, the instrumentation options). Are there any plans to attempt to replicate the layout and options of the WX components? (Perhaps the old WX layout style and functionality are being abandoned for good reason; if that's the case, if anybody could clarify that for me or point me in the right direction I would be most appreciative.)
   

Thanks everyone, and I look forward to hearing from you!

--George

I don't like the instrumentation panel in WX. It's clunky and doesn't scale well. And it takes up a lot of screen real estate that could be used for looking at the signals. However, I know that a lot of people like it for quick access to some of the features. As I said, it's all available in the drop-down menu, but it can take a few clicks to get to the right thing.

I'm actually working on this now. Something to hack on while at ELC, basically. My main goal with it, though, is that I want a button or trigger to hide the panel, so you can open it up or close it depending on what you are doing or trying to see. But really, this is just adding QT widgets to do what's already available in the menus, so nothing really "new" just, hopefully, more user friendly.

One thing that would be really appreciated is if you want to look over the manual page and make suggestions and add material to make it more clear to people what the capabilities are and how to use them.

http://gnuradio.org/doc/doxygen/page_qtgui.html

And we'll probably have more to-do's next week when we chat about this at the hackfest.

Thanks for your interest.

Tom