update threaded tkinter gui

Question

I have a small display connected to my pi. Now I have a Python script that measures the time between two events of the gpio headers. I want to display this time (the script to get this time is working perfectly). For that I created a tkinter window. There, I have a label that should display this time. I have threaded the gui function to make it possible for the program to still listen to the GPIO pin.

def guiFunc():
    gui = Tk()
    gui.title("Test")
    gui.geometry("500x200")
    app = Frame(gui)
    app.grid()
    beattime = Label(app, text = "test")
    beattime.grid()
    gui.mainloop()


gui_thread = threading.Thread(target = guiFunc)
gui_thread.start()


while True:
    time.sleep(.01)
    if (GPIO.input(3)):
        time = trigger()  #trigger is the function to trigger the 'stopwatch'
        global beattime
        beattime['text'] = str(time)
        while GPIO.input(3): #'wait' for btn to release (is there a better way?)
            print "btn_pressed"

So the program isn't doing anything since I added these lines:

global beattime
beattime['text'] = str(time)

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Use tkinter.StringVar

# omitting lines
global timevar
timevar = StringVar()
timevar.set("Test")
beattime = Label(app, textvariable=timevar)
# omitting lines

#changing the text:
while True:
    time.sleep(.01)
    if (GPIO.input(3)):
       time = trigger()  #trigger is the    function to trigger the 'stopwatch'
       timevar.set(str(time))
       root.update() #just in case

       while GPIO.input(3): #'wait' for btn to release (is there a better way?)
          print "btn_pressed"

And you should run the gui in your main thread. Its not recommended to call gui calls from different threads.