QDSP, short for "Quick Dynamic Scatter Plot" (or alternatively, "Quick and Dirty Scatter Plot") is a lightweight C library for creating dynamic, real-time scatter plots. On decent hardware, it should be able to render 10^6 points every frame.
QDSP uses semantic versioning, so any changes made after 1.0.0 will be backwards-compatible (until I realize that I've made an unforgivable design decision and end up releasing 2.0.0).
I work in a research group that focuses on computational plasma physics. A few months back, I was troubleshooting some code, and I needed a way to view phase plots while debugging (piping the data to gnuplot was too slow) I was learning OpenGL at the time, so I hacked together some code to monitor my simulation in real time. This ended up being really useful, so I cleaned it up and turned it into a library.
So far, QDSP is only ported to Linux. There's a very good chance that it'll work on OS X, but I haven't tested it. Windows users might be able to get it to build, but they'll have to mess around with the Makefile to actually install it.
At some point in the future, I'll redo the build system and make it runs on everything. I'm not really familiar with how Windows manages libraries, so it will probably be a long time before this happens. If anyone else wants to take a crack at it, feel free.
QDSP requires the following dependencies, which should be available in most package repositories:
In addition, Doxygen is required to generate documentation for the C API, and Sphinx is required to generate documentation for the Python API.
To install, just run:
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo ldconfig
After building, this will install the shared library to /usr/local/lib, the
header to /usr/local/include, and resources to /usr/local/share/qdsp. You
may need to add /usr/local/lib to your system's ldconfig path. You can modify
the install location by changing the INSTPREFIX variable in the Makefile.
The Python bindings can be installed by running pip install . in the python
directory. You'll need to have the C library installed to actually use them.
I'll get a PyPI package put up at some point.
Just put #include <qdsp.h> in your code and link with -lqdsp.
Documentation is available here for the C API and here for the Python wrapper.
Look at the file src/example1.c for a basic example of how to use QDSP (run
make example1 if you want to try it out). You can also look at example2,
which uses QDSP to render the phase plot of a 1D PIC simulation. A separate
Python example is located in python/example.py.
C documentation can be generated by cding into the docs directory and
running doxygen. Python documentation can be generated by cding into
python/docs and running make html.
QDSP is licensed under the LGPL. This means you can use it for pretty much
anything, but a modified version of the library itself can only be distributed
under a compatible license. For more information, see the LICENSE file.
QDSP was primarily developed by Matt Mitchell. Please direct all questions, comments, and concerns to matthew.s.mitchell@colorado.edu.
Want to help improve QDSP? See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.
Thanks to Matt Miecnikowski for adding the Fortran bindings.