Advanced users • Best software tool to animate speedometer

I would like to create a speedometer application. There are three parameters I would like to display. These include 1. current speed, 2. odometer, 3. bright headlights indicator. I want to display the output on an LCD screen. I have already two means of measuring speed (gps and hall effect speed sensor). The bright light input is simply a matter of sensing with a gpio pin (with a 12V voltage step down). The odometer would be tracked via regular writing to a database on a raspberry pi. All combined, I am asking the pi to perform a lot of tasks. I want to use a small form factor pi (such as a nano or pico) to reduce size and to add robustness for regularly powering the vehicle on and off. Given this, how should I go about animating?

I have already created a png image of the antique vehicle speedometer. I plan to use this as the background and then add indicator needle, odometer, and bight light indicator animation to the screen. The refresh rate of the indicator needle needs to be fast (0.2 seconds?) to make the gauge responsive. The question is, what software library and language would be best? I'm concerned about 1.) overtaxing the raspberry pi and 2.) selecting a software language that is too complex for an amateur to learn.

I thought about using pygame and simply treating the indicator needle as a sprite that I would rotate. Another option might be to animate with tkinter. However, both seem to require a lot of overhead to run and might not be robust enough for the application I want to build. I am open to other recommendations.

Cheers!

Statistics: Posted by jeremycalifornia — Tue Mar 04, 2025 3:46 am — Replies 2 — Views 58

---