GUI and Plotting

The graphics module of empyric provides a graphical user interface (GUI) through the ExperimentGUI class, with which a user can monitor and interact with an experiment, and the Plotter class which provides some shortcuts for generating plots of experiment data.

The Plotter class takes a pandas DataFrame as its only required argument, and plot settings are defined by the optional settings keyword argument. The given DataFrame must have a ‘time’ column and datetime indices. If no plot settings are specified, it is assumed that all columns except the ‘time’ column in the DataFrame are to be plotted against the ‘time’ column, in one plot. The private methods of Plotter listed below should not be used directly, but are called from the plot method based on the plot settings.

The ExperimentGUI class takes an instance of Experiment as its only required argument. It can also be optionally equipped with alarms, a set of instruments, an experiment name, and plot specifications through keyword arguments. When a Manager is instantiated with a runcard, it constructs and runs an instance of this GUI.