Make an animated widgetbutton

[kociak]

For some cases, it would be nice to have a button who's icon is animated. This can be because you want to notify to the user a transient state (in my case, something is moving) or attract their attention for an action (in my case, a fault that needs to be fixed manually).

I have made a blinkable button using a thread that regularly fires an Event.Event(). This works nicely (see at the end a rough example), but I don't like this design which is quite twisted. I guess the button widget itself should handle animation.

As I see it, the easiest would be a Animatedwidgetbutton who could have among its parameters a icon|List[icon] and a transition_time. The List[icon] would store the different animated frames of the button, that would be animated at a transition_time rate. If icon is fed rather than a List[icon], then the button is not animated.
How to do it might be through a thread mechanism as in my example (but not in the Converter, of course), but here this is outside of my expertise to give an advice.

example of a blinkable button using a Converter:

class StateToIconConverterBlinkable():
    def __init__(self, instrument:  MonchActuatorDevice):
        self.__instrument = instrument
        data1 = pkgutil.get_data(__name__, 'resources/icon1.png')
        data2 = pkgutil.get_data(__name__, 'resources/icon2.png')
        data3 = pkgutil.get_data(__name__, 'resources/icon3.png')
        self.__icon1 = CanvasItem.load_rgba_data_from_bytes(data1, "png")
        self.__icon2 = CanvasItem.load_rgba_data_from_bytes(data2, "png")
        self.__icon3 = CanvasItem.load_rgba_data_from_bytes(data3, "png")
        self.icon = self.__icon1
        self.__first_pass = True
        self.kill_blink_event = threading.Event()

    def convert(self, value:typing.Optional[MonchActuatorDevice.State]):
        if self.__instrument.state is MonchActuatorDevice.State.Observemove:
            self.ThreadedUpdate()
        else:
            self.kill_blink_event.is_set()
            self.icon = self.__icon3
            self.kill_blink_event.clear()

        return self.icon

    def ThreadedUpdate(self):
        threading.Thread(target = self.update).start()

    def update(self):
        time.sleep(0.3)
        if self.icon is self.__icon1:
            self.icon = self.__icon2
        else:
            self.icon = self.__icon1
        self.__instrument.property_changed_event.fire("state")
        if self.kill_blink_event.is_set():
            return