Setting up Pixyz UI

Pixyz SDK comes with a copy of Pixyz UI. Depending on the setup, there are multiple ways to launch it.

Important

A valid license for Pixyz SDK is required to use Pixyz UI.

Prerequisites

To run Pixyz UI, it is necessary to have Python installed on your machine. We recommend version 3.10 or newer.

Installation via pip

Open Pixyz UI

After the initial setup of Pixyz SDK for python via pip, Pixyz UI is already installed. To launch the UI, open a terminal and activate the virtual environment. Then, run

pxzui

pixyzui

Both are executables in your virtual environment's Script folder. Sometimes it can be useful to create a shortcut on windows to have Pixyz UI ready without opening a terminal. To do so, just right-click on <VENV>/Scripts/pxzui.exe (with <VENV> being the name of your virtual environment) in the explorer and select "Create shortcut".

Inspect Pixyz UI's sources

To better understand what Pixyz UI is doing in order to write your own UI with pixyz or extend Pixyz UI with your functionality, its sources are accessible. Inside of the virtual environment, there is a folder <VENV>/Lib/site-packages/pxzui. Here, you can find the source code and see how the DefaultUI is created. For further information on how to create a customized UI, see Create a Custom UI.

Installation via downloaded zip

There are multiple ways to run Pixyz UI after downloading the zipped Pixyz SDK from pixyz-software.com.

Windows

Start from batch file

We recommend executing PixyzUI.bat, which can be found in the Pixyz UI folder. It will automatically set up the virtual environment and install all necessary dependencies. This will take a moment, but is only necessary once. Afterwards, it will just launch Pixyz UI, as long as the virtual environment is up to date.

cd PixyzUI
./PixyzUI.bat

Developer setup

If you wish to check under the hood of Pixyz UI or want to develop your own UI application, we recommend you to set up Pixyz UI with PyCharm. Open the Pixyz UI folder via File/Open.... If you have already run the bat/sh script from the previous chapter, PyCharm should automatically detect the virtual environment in PixyzUI/.venv. If not, you can perform the setup with the required packages yourself via PyCharm

or by setting up the virtual environment from command line:

python -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r .\requirements.txt

python -m venv .venv
source ./.venv/Scripts/activate
pip install -r .\requirements.txt

In order to launch main.py, you will need to pass the path to the binaries as a parameter. They are in the bin directory of Pixyz SDK. It might help to setup a run configuration for main.py in PyCharm and pass ../bin as "Script Parameter".

From the command line, you can simply pass the path as an argument to launch Pixyz UI.

python main.py "../bin"

Keep in mind that the python interpreter won't automatically discover the modules of the sdk for autocompletion, unless you add the binaries to your interpreter path. Check out the PyCharm installation instructions in Pixyz SDK Setup on how to do that.