Hmm, I'm not so sure that Tkinter example really solves the problem of performing background work without blocking the UI. Sure, the UI thread doesn't block, bu

Hmm, I'm not so sure that Tkinter example really solves the problem of performing background work without blocking the UI. Sure, the UI thread doesn't block, but instead the UI state (as the user continues interacting with it) can drift out of sync with the model when the controller thread is busy with other work. The real issue in that example seems to be that the event loop needs to wait for both UI events and read/write readyness on the serial port. This could probably be handled either with createfilehandler[1] (although it doesn't work on Windows) or by dedicating a thread to handling the serial port and posting messages to the Tkinter event loop as suggested at the end. [1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/tkinter.html#file-handlers https://docs.python.org/3/library/tkinter.html#file-handlers