History

I need (a lot of) different gauges for a robotic project I’m doing, to monitor voltage, current, motors rpm and many other parameters related to the inner thinking of the robot. When troubleshooting, the robot console has to run on a “device”, and I was undecided when starting which kind of device it would be, PC, tablet or other. So I just started writing the console using the (excellent) wxPython, meaning using a PC as the console in the field. I used Andrea Gavana SpeedMeter for the gauges and was very happy with it, in particular its flexibility in representing various range of data.

However, I finally decided that, in the field, a tablet was better suited to be able to “travel lightly”, so to speak. This ruled out wxPython, and I started to use Kivy for its ability to run both under Linux and Android, which I must say has been very satisfactory so far. However, in switching to Kivy I lost my beloved speedmeter, so I took a few weeks to rewrite it under Kivy, learning Kivy along the way. I saw that Kivy graphical model was based on GL, and I had used it back in the 90s (not openGL, the original GL on Silicon Graphics workstations), so I wasn’t in completely unknown territory.