A few questions regarding QT GUI development

GNU Radio
1

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.

     With that in mind, I have a few questions:

 1. Who is involved with QT GUI development for gnuradio?
 2. 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.
 3. 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

2

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 9:01 AM, George H. [email protected]
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.

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.

–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

3

Whoops, didn’t see this reply when I wrote my own!

M

4

Aha! The middle menu button click works after all :slight_smile: Thank you very
much for your help everyone!

I was able to get the middle button click functionality to work in the
individual sinks (QT GUI Time Sink, QT GUI Frequency Sink, QT GUI
Constellation Sink, and QT GUI Waterfall Sink) however, I was not able
to get the middle button menu functionality to work in the “master”
instrumentation block (QT GUI Sink). That may be an issue with my
installation of gnuradio; unsure.

Per your suggestion I’ll look over the manual page and see what I can do
to help; thank you so much for yours!

–George

5

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 12:56 PM, George H. [email protected]
wrote:

Aha! The middle menu button click works after all :slight_smile: Thank you very much
for your help everyone!

I was able to get the middle button click functionality to work in the
individual sinks (QT GUI Time Sink, QT GUI Frequency Sink, QT GUI
Constellation Sink, and QT GUI Waterfall Sink) however, I was not able to
get the middle button menu functionality to work in the “master”
instrumentation block (QT GUI Sink). That may be an issue with my
installation of gnuradio; unsure.

Nope, it won’t work in the QT GUI Sink. That one is designed and
instrumented completely differently. I’d actually like to get rid of
that
one and possibly replace it with a block that just has a tab widget that
includes the other widgets that are already instrumented. It’s just a
very
low priority, and you can easily handle this yourself in GRC by making
your
own tabbed box.

Per your suggestion I’ll look over the manual page and see what I can do
to help; thank you so much for yours!

–George

Tom