SmartSinePy, and an example of GUI development with PySide6

SmartSinePy, and an example of GUI development with PySide6

  November 10, 2023    Tahmid

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Source code at: https://github.com/SyedTahmidMahbub/SmartSinePy

Quite a very long time ago, I had posted a Windows tool called Smart Sine to generate a sine table. See: https://tahmidmc.blogspot.com/2012/10/smart-sine-software-to-generate-sine.html

This was very useful for pre-generating the sine-table instead of in the main program itself, often useful to save space (and not have to perform trig operations) especially on 8-bit microcontrollers.

I was recently looking into developing quick GUIs for some test bench automation and was primarily looking for something where I could position and size GUI elements visually (a WYSIWYG editor, basically) and decided to dig into QT Designer and PySide6. I don't mind defining properties and event handlers programmatically (in fact I do prefer it) but what I really don't want to do is have to add every GUI element in code and define its location and size - this is where the QT Designer's visual editing really comes in helpful! Reminds me a lot of the Visual Studio GUI editor back in Visual Basic development days.

This provided a good opportunity to redo Smart Sine and have an example project for developing the GUI application. A few aspects explored on the GUI side of things:

• Creating the layout in QT Designer
• Getting inputs from a table
• Working with GUI widget signals (events such as button pressed or slider value changed)
• Updating text in labels and a text browser (textbox)
• Generating a plot with matplotlib and embedded it on the GUI

This is a great reference for embedding matplotlib: https://david.roesel.cz/notes/posts/matplotlib-figure-embedded-in-qt/

Particularly about temporarily adding a text box within the widget to specify the layout.

For this particular project, I read in the .ui file (that QT Designer generates) straight in the main code without an intermediate conversion.

Here is a snapshot from QT Designer:

Here are a couple snapshots of the application running:

There are a fair few Python dependencies that you will have to install. A one-line command for installing them is:

python3 -m pip install pyside6 numpy pyperclip matplotlib

If there's interest in packaging this up into an executable, let me know!

Source code at: https://github.com/SyedTahmidMahbub/SmartSinePy

The code is commented and should be self-explanatory. But if there are specific questions or anything that is unclear, let me know and I can clear it up!