Pythonista demo of a single worker thread which polls a website for updates and displays the result in `Scene.draw`.

ThreadedSceneDemo.py

from datetime import datetime
import Queue
import re
import threading
import urllib2

from scene import *

OUTPUT_TEMPLATE = u"""\
Number of threads: {}
Queue size: {}
Frame number: {}
Last polled: {}
Current time: {}
"""


# Thread worker
def worker(q):
    URL = 'http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl'
    RE_TIME = re.compile('<BR>(.*?)\t.*Universal Time')

    while True:
        obj = q.get()
        html = urllib2.urlopen(URL).read()
        obj.text = RE_TIME.search(html).group(1)
        q.task_done()


class ThreadedSceneDemo(Scene):
    def setup(self):
        self.text = 'Waiting...'
        self.frame = 0
        self.q = Queue.Queue(1)

        # Start a single worker thread
        t = threading.Thread(target=worker, args=(self.q,))
        t.daemon = True
        t.start()

    def draw(self):
        # This will be called for every frame (typically 60 times per second).
        self.frame += 1
        now = datetime.utcnow().strftime('%b. %d, %H:%M:%S UTC')

        # Schedule another poll if the worker finished processing the last job
        if self.q.empty():
            self.q.put(self)

        output = OUTPUT_TEMPLATE.format(
            threading.active_count(), self.q.qsize(), self.frame, self.text,
            now
        )

        background(0, 0, 0)
        text(output, alignment=9)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    run(ThreadedSceneDemo())

The URL is not getting closed. if garbage collection does not happen fast enough, the threads might get into a race condition. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3880750/closing-files-properly-opened-with-urllib2-urlopen

You might consider replacing:

    html = urllib2.urlopen(URL).read()

with:

from contextlib import closing

    with closing(urllib2.urlopen(URL)) as source:
         html = source.read()