Python Matplotlib Live Updating Graphs - part 1

Key Takeaways

hello and welcome to another matplotlib tutorial in this video I'm going to be teaching you all how to make live updating charts and graphs with in that plot live depending on what kind of work you do having a live updating charts and graphs can be pretty ideal and I know that whenever I'm stirring trying to figure out how to make this happen it was pretty much not taught by anyone so I had to go to the documentation to figure it out so at least for me what I was doing was trying to stream stock prices and then have it kind of change obviously with new prices but then you could also you can change more than just like the line right you can change everything in that whole figure so I made it so like the spines and the tick labels of the graph would change dynamically based on signals sent from a price or sentiment on my end so the lines basically around the chart right would change to green if you know there's a positive signal or change to red if there was a negative signal and so on so so it's obviously a bunch of uses that you can do not just have a line be live but also you can change the entire chart dynamically so pretty cool stuff so any way to do this the only thing that you really need is matplotlib I'm going to assume that most of you guys have map plot live already but if you don't I will link to the some windows binaries for Python extensions or you can go to matplotlib org and go to their download and download whatever version you need so if you have any issues downloading power matplotlib rather let me know I'm just going to assume most people watching this specific video probably already have matplotlib either coming through my series coming through their own stuff and finding it by you know typing and how to make live Python charts with matplotlib or you're coming from my charting tutorial either way you probably have it so I'm not going to waste your time with that so once you have matplotlib you should be all set I do suggest that you watch the other videos here with matplotlib but you can actually start this tutorial pretty fresh even if you have not ever used ma'am front lip so that will be okay and eventually what I'm going to do is tie this the live updating charts to our pre-existing charting in Python tutorial series so we'll pull live prices from Yahoo's API in the there are like five minute open high low close prices every every five minutes are updated so I'll show you guys how to do that and and then obviously you could if you have your own streaming prices you can tie it into wherever you have streaming prices so cool stuff ahead let's go ahead and get started probably the only thing I'm going to do in this video is show you guys the documentation for what we're going to do if you come over to matplotlib a mat lab is like that it's a it's a lot bigger than I think most people realize at least more than I realize it's kind of like Python you know you think you know a lot in Python until you start learning about all the stuff you don't know in Python anyway matplotlib org slash API slash and when you come here we're going to be interested in this animation function but you can't look through like all of this stuff there's all kinds of really cool stuff in here and each one has a bunch of stuff so like an animation we've got all this all these various things that you can do with an animation what we're interested in is passing a function through so if you just type in func you probably find it here we go what we're looking at is this animation dot func animation so this is going to let us do is pass a function through these this animation functionality within matplotlib so we're going to pass through a function that each time it's going to look for new prices if it finds them it will do that also within that same function we can do all of the stuff that we were talking about before like dynamically changing colors you can even have it dynamically change the zoom or I mean just anything right like you can put anything you want in that function so it's really really cool so that's what we're going to be doing obviously in here the only thing that we're really in you need will tell what figure will tell it the func in and that's pretty much it well so we're also going to have a refresh time in there and so on so anyway that's what we're going to be doing in the next video so if that sounds interesting stick around and we'll probably get out our first live updating chart in that next video so as always thanks for watching thank you for all the support the subscriptions and until next time