interval-timer

interval-timer is a Python package that enables iterating over a sequence of regular time intervals with high precision.

Installation

Install from PyPI via:

pip install interval-timer

Usage

Basic usage is as follows:

from interval_timer import IntervalTimer

for interval in IntervalTimer(0.5):
    print(interval)
    
    # Execute code exactly every half second here
    ...

Output:

Interval(index=0, time=0.000, lag=0.000)
Interval(index=1, time=0.500, lag=0.000)
Interval(index=2, time=1.000, lag=0.000)
...

For more usage examples see examples/.

Description

IntervalTimer is an iterator object that returns Interval objects at regular time intervals. Code can then be executed upon each time interval, and the intervals will stay synchronised even when the code execution time is non-zero.

IntervalTimer is a more precise replacement for a loop that contains a wait. The following code:

from time import sleep

# Iterates approximately every half second
for i in range(5):
    print(i)
    sleep(0.5)

can be replaced with:

from interval_timer import IntervalTimer

# Iterates exactly every half second
for interval in IntervalTimer(0.5, stop=5):
    print(interval)

interval-timer uses perf_counter under the hood to obtain high precision timing. It will not suffer from drift over long time periods.

If an interval iteration is delayed due to slow code execution, then future intervals will still be synchronised to absolute time if they're given time to catch up. The caller can see if synchronisation has been temporarily lost by checking if the Interval object's lag attribute returns a non-zero value (see the lag.py example).

Timing diagram

The above timing diagram shows that each returned Interval object has the following attributes:

• time: the nominal start time of the interval. Always has equal value to the end_time value of the previous interval.
• buffer: the length of time before the interval start time that the interval was requested. The minimum buffer is zero.
• lag: The length of time after the interval start time that the interval was requested. The minimum lag is zero. If the lag is non-zero, then the code executed within the previous interval took longer than the interval period, which is generally undesirable.