[PyQt] threading

[Lawrence Shafer]

I've been playing with threading the last few hours, because I have a 
lcd number object in the gui that I want to update once per second. Am I 
barking up the right tree with threading? The problem Ive got is self is 
no longer defined in countFunction. Is there a way to run a thread that 
has access to *everything*?


=============================================================================================
import os
import platform
import time
from math import pi
import re
import thread
from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui
import ui_shoptime

class MainWindow(QtGui.QMainWindow,
        ui_shoptime.Ui_ShopTime):

    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(MainWindow, self).__init__(parent)
        self.__index = 0
        self.setupUi(self)

    def on_startButton_clicked(self):
        self.startButton.toggle()
        startTime = time.time()
        thread.start_new_thread(countFunction(startTime))
        #threading.Thread(target=count).start()
        #count().start()
        #thread.start_new_thread(countFunction, ())

def countFunction(startTime,*args):
    while 1:
        runtime = time.time() - startTime
        print runtime
        runtimeSeconds = runtime / 60
        self.runningTime.display(runtimeSeconds)
        time.sleep(1)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import sys

    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    form = MainWindow()
    form.show()
    app.exec_()
    #print form.text()