brian2tools.plotting.base module

Base module for the plotting facilities.

brian2tools.plotting.base.add_background_pattern(axes, hatch='xxx', fill=True, fc=(0.9, 0.9, 0.9), ec=(0.8, 0.8, 0.8), zorder=-10, **kwds)

Add a “hatching” pattern to the background of the axes (can be useful to make a difference between “no value” and a value mapped to a color value that is identical to the background color). By default, it uses a cross hatching pattern in gray which can be changed by providing the respective arguments. All additional keyword arguments are passed on to the Rectangle initializer.

Parameters:

• axes (matplotlib.axes.Axes) – The axes where the background pattern should be added.

• hatch (str, optional) – See matplotlib.patches.Patch.set_hatch. Defaults to 'xxx'.

• fill (bool, optional) – See matplotlib.patches.Patch.set_fill. Defaults to True.

• fc (mpl color spec or None or 'none') – See matplotlib.patches.Patch.set_facecolor. Defaults to (0.9, 0.9, 0.9).

• ec (mpl color spec or None or 'none') – See matplotlib.patches.Patch.set_edgecolor. Defaults to (0.8, 0.8, 0.8).

• zorder (int) – See matplotlib.artist.Artist.set_zorder. Defaults to -10.

brian2tools.plotting.base.brian_plot(brian_obj, axes=None, **kwds)

Plot the data of the given object (e.g. a monitor). This function will call an adequate plotting function for the object, e.g. plot_raster for a SpikeMonitor. The plotting may apply heuristics to get a generally useful plot (e.g. for a PopulationRateMonitor, it will plot the rates smoothed with a Gaussian window of 1 ms), the exact details are subject to change. This function is therefore mostly meant as a quick and easy way to plot an object, for full control use one of the specific plotting functions.

When a StateMonitor that records several variables is given, a column of subplots sharing the time axis is created automatically.

Parameters:

• brian_obj (object) – The Brian object to plot.

• axes (Axes or array-like of Axes, optional) – The Axes instance used for plotting. Defaults to None which means that a new Axes will be created for the plot. For a multi-variable StateMonitor, pass an array-like of Axes with one entry per recorded variable.

• kwds (dict, optional) –

  Any additional keywords command will be handed over to matplotlib’s plot command. This can be used to set plot properties such as the color.

  For multi-variable StateMonitor objects, var_name and var_unit may be dictionaries keyed by variable name, e.g. var_name={'v': 'membrane potential', 'I': 'input current'}.

Returns:

axes – The Axes instance(s) used for plotting. A list is returned when multiple state variables are plotted.

Return type:

Axes or list of Axes