I’m making improvements to some previously written code for a tkinter GUI that allows the user to setup some hardware graphically rather than entering the commands manually through CuteCom (a serial terminal), as well as providing some level of automation through config files. In short, the GUI takes the user through a few pages where they enter various settings or select a config file containing the settings they want, and on the last page they hit an “install” button. After clicking install, the program looks for the prompts coming over the serial port and then sends the corresponding commands according to the settings the user selected on the previous pages.

The problem I’m having is that once the install process begins, the program is essentially frozen until it completes. There’s currently no indication that anything is happening until it’s finished and it takes a while, so I’d like to add a progress bar or possibly a text log that tells the user about each process as it is completed but with the program frozen I’m not sure how to do that. At the moment I just have it printing to the terminal after each process is complete.

I’m guessing it’s something to do with it running as a single thread so while the install process is ongoing the root.mainloop() is interrupted (or something along those lines). I’m new to tkinter and python as a whole so any help or suggestions would be much appreciated 🙂