Three things were making the panel feel slow, all of them waiting rather
than working.
The trailing quiet window is waited out once per query, so it set the pace
of the whole sweep: at 50 ms that was 400 ms of a 590 ms poll spent
listening to silence. A reply streams at the baud rate — ~1 ms between
bytes, no measurable gap between its lines — and the deadline restarts on
every line read, so 20 ms outlasts the gap it exists for twenty times over.
A tail that still arrives late is caught by _discard_input(), which is what
actually protects the next query. Replayed against the rig transcript, a
sweep goes from 590 ms to 356 ms.
The poll interval was 1 s on top of that, so a value could be 1.6 s stale.
At 0.3 s the panel comes round about every 0.65 s.
And a poll held the port for its whole sweep, so a button pressed during
one waited for all eight queries. _work_pending() on the worker base lets a
poll drop what is left as soon as the operator queues something: a click
now waits ~135 ms for the register read in progress instead of the full
sweep, and the rest is picked up next time round.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
gui/qt_workers.py — one QueueWorker base replaces the per-device command
queue + dispatch + signal boilerplate. The loop blocks on the queue
instead of waking 10-20x/second forever (test_idle_worker_does_not_spin
asserts an idle worker burns ~no CPU). PollingQueueWorker adds
self-rescheduling polling: the next poll is queued only after the
previous finishes, so a device slower than the interval can't accumulate
a backlog (test_polling_never_overlaps_or_backs_up).
Helios responsiveness — the concrete bug that motivated the above: a free
running 1 s QTimer queued a status poll that took ~2 s, so the queue grew
for as long as the panel stayed connected.
- helios_laser._query reads until the CR terminator instead of sleeping a
fixed 0.05 + 0.2 s per query
- one _query_int() helper replaces five copies of parse-with-logging
- polling is now driven by the worker; HeliosWindow's QTimer is gone
- dropped __del__, which disabled the laser and wrote to the serial port
from the garbage collector at an unpredictable time
helios_test_app.py — the worker was moveToThread'd but every call site
invoked its methods directly, so all serial I/O (including the sleeps)
ran on the GUI thread; Query All froze the UI for ~2 s. Calls now go
through a queued signal to a pyqtSlot. Also: connect/disconnect cycles
leaked a QThread + worker + 9 connections each time; 16 copies of the
not-connected guard collapse to _require_connection(); the Query Power
button called a method that has never existed (AttributeError popup) and
is now disabled and documented in KNOWN_ISSUES.
DCBiasImageWidget preallocates its image and uses set_data/set_clim, so
the live preview stops rebuilding the array and the whole artist tree per
row (O(rows^2) over a scan).
bbd20x: connect() now raises when no bays respond instead of reporting
success on the wrong port; disconnect() joins with a timeout so a wedged
reader can't hang shutdown; one _channel_for() helper replaces four
copy-pasted axis mappings; hardcoded travel limits become TRAVEL_MM; the
joke error strings are gone.
gui/widgets.py adds the shared ConnectionBar / PortSelector / bounded
LogConsole / StatusGrid for the test benches to adopt. 65 tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Thomas Ales