Saturday, March 3, 2018

Very simple way to animate in Jupyter notebooks

I want to use Google Colaboratory for my python course, but the module we use for animation doesn't work there because the necessary libraries are not installed. I had planned to spend part of the weekend to see if I could find a solution but by amazing coincidence a tweet in my Twitter stream this morning had the answer!



The answer is simply to display the images sequentially and clear the output each time with clear_output(wait=True) from IPython.display. You can see the demo code I wrote below.  This works very nicely on my off-line notebook (where you want to execute this line in a cell above the notebook itself: %matplotlib inline) while the animation is a bit choppy on Colaboratory, presumably due  to network latency. But it's certainly good enough.

Thanks again to Twitter for saving me tons of time!



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

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