Serial Data Plotting Programs

I use Matplotlib for any plotting I need to do.

It's not arduino specific in any way, but it is a very excellent Python plotting toolkit.

I've built a number of applications that plot data from a variety of microcontrollers in real-time to a graph, but that was really more of a two-step process: 1. Get data from device into computer, 2. plot realtime data.

Really, I think you should break your question into two parts:

• How do you get data from an Arduino/Any serial device into a computer easily.
• What is a good plotting library that is easy to use.

GnuPlot

Advantages: It's very flexible, scriptable, and freely available.

Disadvantages: A bit complex to learn (but I figured out how to get started in a few minutes, and quite functional in an hour or two), runs in a terminal window (if you consider that a disadvantage).

Something I found very useful was to script it to reload my terminal program's logfile periodically so i got a dynamic graph as my experiment progressed.

Edit: Here is the GnuPlot script that plots it:

#!/usr/local/bin/gnuplot -rv
# Note reverse video here ^^^   til I find a way to put it in the script

# gpFanCtl - Plots DiffThermo fan controller data (aloft, alow, Tdiff, fan-state).
# $Id: gpFanCtl,v 1.8 2014-04-28 09:40:51-04 jrobert Exp jrobert $

set terminal x11 1 noraise
set xtics 3600
set mxtics 4
set xdata time

set ytics 1 nomirror
set mytics 2

set y2range [0:3]
set y2tics 1
set my2tics 4

set grid
set ylabel 'Temperature, degC'
set y2label 'Tdiff, degC' textcolor rgb '#00CD63'

cd '/Users/jrobert/Desktop'
plot "Logfile.txt" using ($0*4):1 title "Aloft" with lines lc rgb "red",\
     "Logfile.txt" using ($0*4):2 title "Alow" with lines lc rgb "#3982FF",\
     "Logfile.txt" using ($0*4):3 title "Tdiff" with lines lc rgb "#00CD63" axis x1y2,\
     "Logfile.txt" using ($0*4):4 title "Fan" with lines lc rgb "orange" axis x1y2;
pause 4
refresh
reread

Responding to my own question here.. I use Bridge Control Panel as mentioned.

Advantages: Lots of Features.

Disadvantages: Tricky to setup and very poor syntax/error reporting.

To use: You need to write the Arduino Data over the Serial Port one byte at a time. For an int data type that would look as follows:

// RX8 [h=43] @1Key1 @0Key1
Serial.print("C");
Serial.write(data>>8);
Serial.write(data&0xff);

In Bridge the command to Read Data is:

RX8 [h=43] @1Key1 @0Key1

RX8 is the read command [h=43] means the next valid byte is "C" in ASCII then the High Byte of Key1 then the Low Byte of Key1

It looks like this in Bridge:

You can try serialchart. It's pretty strait forward program. It does exactly what you asked. The only disadvantage is that it requires data in CSV format (does not meet first point).

Screenshot from project page:

I made an equivalent tool in python that print real time data from ADXL345 accelerometer. https://github.com/mba7/SerialPort-RealTime-Data-Plotter

may be it will be helpful for someone

Just choose the serial com and speed and sent a serial data on the following format:

• 3 inputs, every input is a 2 bytes (Two's complement )
• 6 bytes seperated by a space
• the packet is a string terminated by '\n'

Could be easily adapted to change this format

There are some good applications for visualizing the serial data, including:

• MegunoLink ($29.95; Lite free) - plotting, logging, programming, reporting and more.

  

• MakerPlot ($39) - digital & analog plotting, monitoring, custom interfaces and more.

  

• ArduinoPlot (free) - simple plotting.

  

• Bridge Control Panel (free) - logging, plotting, and more.

  

• RealtimePlotter (free) - 6 channels data plotting.

  

• Real Time Serial Data Plotter (free) - CSV data plotting, logging and more.

• SimPlot (free) - 4 channel plotting.

  

(This is a community wiki, you can expand the list.)

While I haven't used it myself, "rqt_plot" running on the PC seems to be a popular way to plot data on a PC that comes over a serial port from an Arduino running a sketch that includes the rosserial_arduino library or the ros_arduino_bridge library.

• Arduino Oscilloscope Tutorial
• rosserial arduino
• visualize everything using rqt_plot... my first arduino micro ros project
• "7/24: Now that I have the Arduino set up using Kessel, I can visualize the data better using ROS tools"
• etc.

You can use MATLAB Student Edition, this can save your time for further analysis, too. You can just open the COM port in MATLAB and plot the received signal and/or save the signal in the workspace or whatever. MATLAB makes everything easy!