Animate your name with matplotlib

Motivation

I have been coding with Python for 3 years during which I worked on many professional, academic, and personal projects. 3 years of intense Python usage in data science, computational mathematics, and web and UI development.

Countless were the hours where I sat in front of my computer and enjoyed as well as disliked coding with Python. In short, I can say that this language has become not only an irreducible part of my day-to-day life but also an unforgettable part of my memories.

Following Tobias Smollett quote "Number 3 is always fortunate", and to celebrate these 3 years, there was nothing better than making a tool that animates a given grid using the so-called packages numpy and matplotlib and particularly to use it to animate my name.

Usage

If you want to try this tool, firstly you need to clone the repository, create a virtual environment and install requirements.

If you are not familiar with that, refer to my test repo where I detailed these steps.

After doing that, create a new python file your_python_file.py within animate_your_name_src folder.

Create an animated grid

The needed modules to build an animated grid are matplotlib.pyplot and class_render_grid

# imports
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from class_render_grid import AnimatedGrid

matplotlib.pyplot will serve to create a figure where to plot and animate the grid, whereas class_render_grid.AnimatedGrid is the core class that contains all the logic for animating a given grid.

After the imports, initialize a figure and axis object to plot and show the animation

# init fig where to draw animation
fig, ax = plt.subplots()

Input the grid you want to animate as a 2D array. I realized that is a bit complicated to create either manually or by code a grid, especially for complex shapes. Therefore, I created a user interface that eases this operation. Follow this link to access the user interface and this link for detail about the repository

# an example of a 2x2 grid
grid = [[1, 0], [0, 1]]

Finally, create an instance of Animated grid and then launch / save the animation

# init object
g = AnimatedGrid(fig=fig, ax=ax, grid=grid)

# animate
# an save animation
g.animate(pathname="screenshots/example_animated_grid.gif")

# show the animation
plt.show()

An example script can be found at animate_your_name_src/example_usage.py

Animating my name

Following the steps above,

Note: The prime trigger to concretize this idea was my desire to offer animation as a gift to a close friend for his birthday.