Barebones manual animations in matplotlib

plot_interactive.py

"""
Using matplotlib for manually creating animations. Works similar to FuncAnimation. Manual animation is a bit simpler than using the animations API in general since it is still capable of handling some events (like window resizing) automatically.
"""

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np



# Create a figure and axis for plotting on
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

# Add the line 'artist' to the plotting axis
# use 'steps' to plot binary codes
line = plt.Line2D((),(),drawstyle='steps-pre')
ax.add_line(line)

# Apply any static formatting to the axis
ax.grid()
ax.set_ylim(-2, 2)
# ...

try:
    limit = int(raw_input('Enter the value of limit:'))
    codelength = int(np.ceil(np.log2(limit)))+1 # see note*
    ax.set_xlim(0,codelength)

    # Enable interactive plotting
    plt.ion()
    for x in range(0,limit):
        # create your fake data
        y = bin(x)[2:].zfill(codelength)
        data = [int(i) for i in y]
        print data
        xs = range(len(data))

        line.set_data(xs,data)  # Update line data
        fig.canvas.draw()       # Ask to redraw the figure

        # Do a *required* pause to allow figure to redraw
        plt.pause(2)            # delay in seconds between frames
except KeyboardInterrupt:   # allow user to escape with Ctrl+c
    pass
finally:                    # Always clean up!
    plt.close(fig)
    plt.ioff()
    del ax,fig