nathandunk / BetterSerialPlotter

A drop-in replacement for the arduino serial plotter
MIT License
190 stars 29 forks source link

Suggestion - Sending messages to device #8

Open oscgonfer opened 2 years ago

oscgonfer commented 2 years ago

Hi!

Thank you for the amazing app. It's really nicely done. I would like to suggest a feature, which would make our use case (and maybe others) a bit more complete:

The feature would allow you to send a message to the serial device, which then can respond with the data stream. This would be similar to the text box in the Serial Monitor of the Arduino IDE. In our particular case, these type of messages are a way to trigger data streams of sensors in our hardware.

Would you consider something in that regard?

nathandunk commented 2 years ago

Hi @oscgonfer , thanks for the suggestion! I will definitely consider that, but need to make a couple of fixes before I get to it. In your use case, what would be the ideal placement of this feature be? Would another tab be sufficient? Or would you prefer it to be visible alongside plotting or the serial monitor?

oscgonfer commented 2 years ago

Hi @nathandunk, how nice! thank you for your positive reply.

I think it would be more convenient to have it on the Serial Monitor tab, something like this (again resembling the Arduino Serial Monitor). In this case, it makes sense to send a command -> then check that the output is correct -> then go to the plotting tab and configure everything.

imagen

As future "nice features" one thing you could dream of are a modified version of the Config files that you already use (very nice btw), in which some commands can be sent "on serial wake" for instance.

Thank you again!

GeorgeBroughton commented 1 year ago

I agree.

It would also be nice if say, you could drag buttons onto a control panel below the plots or something that send predefined commands to the serial device too. I use arduinos for doing science experiments and it would be kinda nice to just have some sort of stop/start buttons that i could just bake into the interface even if that is to be added in the json config,

But I would just take having the serial monitor docked somewhere in the application, maybe in an expandable accordion at the bottom or something along with the graphs visible on one screen and a text input box.

Since this is written in C++, i might actually be able to do a PR for it.

ubaldot commented 11 months ago

I also vote for this feature! :) It would be great to send messages from the laptop to Arduino!