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nathandunk / BetterSerialPlotter

A drop-in replacement for the arduino serial plotter
MIT License
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You can download the latest release here!

BetterSerialPlotter

The Better Serial Plotter is a drop-in replacement for the arduino serial plotter. You should be able to use code exactly the same way that you would for your Serial Plotter applications, but work with the extended functionality of the Better Serial Plotter. Some beneficial features of the Better Serial plotter include:

What your arduino program should look like

This program is intended to work for any program that already uses the built-in Arduino Serial Plotter. That means that you need to open the Serial communication channel in your setup() function using Serial.begin(BAUD_RATE) where BAUD_RATE could be 9600. Make sure you take note of what baud rate you use. Then in every iteration of your loop() function in your arduino code, you should write to the serial monitor with any amount of variables, each separated by either a tab or a space. Before the loop ends, you should output a newline character. See the Example Arduino Code section at the bottom to see how this could look. See the Example Arduino Code section below for an example

Running the application

Make sure that your arduino (or serial-interface device) is plugged into your computer and running. Run the Better Serial Plotter application, and a graphical interface should open up. From there, click on the Serial Port dropdown on the top of the screen. You should see a list of serial devices attached to your PC. Click on the serial port that your device is attached to. Then, you should click the dropdown for the baud rate and select the baud rate that you used in your Serial.Begin() function in your arduino code. If everything is set up properly, you should see your data on the left side of the application, under the Incoming Data section. If you are having trouble, make sure to check out the troubleshooting tips at the end of this page.

As a super-quick config option, you can click the plot all data button, then right-click the plot and click autoscale to get essentially the same experience as the arduino's built in serial plotter.

Running Application

Configuring Data

The BSP becomes really useful when you want to do some more interesting configurations. Once you are properly connected, on the left side of the screen, you should see a list of all of the variables that you have sent from your arduino code. If you want to configure, the name, plot color, or what plots a variable shows up on, you can right-click the variable name. A context menu should open up as shown below, where you can edit these items. Click on save to make your changes.

Configuring Variables

Adding and Removing Variables to Plots

There are several options for adding and removing variables to plots. Portions of these are shown in the gif below.

Configuring Variables

Plot Controls

There are several configuration options to change how to display your plots, including:

Saving Data

You can save data that you are collecting by clicking on the Export CSV button. This should open a file explorer window where you can choose where to save your data as a .csv file. This will save all of the data that is currently available, meaning that it will still output all of the data from after you clicked the button to when you click save. I am hoping to add an option to save paused data as well, so that you can leave it in a specific state as you work on saving the data.

Saving CSV

Saving/loading configuration

You can save the configuration of your data and plots by clicking the Save Config button. This will save the names and colors of each of the variables, as well as the configuration of the plots, including each of the plot-specific configuration options and what variables are on what axes. This feature has not been extensively tested, so it is possible that this could crash if configured incorrectly.

Save Configuration

Serial Monitor

The serial monitor lets you view all of your data as if it was on the built-in Arduino serial monitor. By default, the data will autoscroll to keep you looking at the most recent data input, but you can click or unclick the autoscroll checkbox to enable or disable this functionality.

Example Arduino Code

There are many ways that you can setup your Arduino code, with two examples shown below.Anything that works with the built-in arduino serial plotter (A nice resource for how to set this up is shown here) should work with the Better Serial Plotter. The general idea is to use Serial.print() functions to print your variables, and to put either a tab "\t" or a space " " in between serial prints. 

// Better Serial Plotter example code 
// https://github.com/nathandunk/BetterSerialPlotter

void setup(){
    Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop(){
    // get all of our variables of interest
    float t = millis()/1000.0;
    float var_sin = sin(t); // sin(t)
    float var_cos = cos(t); // cos(t)

    // write them all to console with tabs in between them
    Serial.print(t);         // first variable is program time in seconds. This can be plotted on an x-axis!
    Serial.print("\t");
    Serial.print(var_sin);   // second variable is sin(t)
    Serial.print("\t");      // this last "\t" isn't required, but doesn't hurt
    Serial.println(var_cos); // third varible is cos(t). make sure to finish with a println!

    // For example, at 2.5 seconds, this prints out like so, where \t
    // is the tab character, and \n is the newline character
    // 2500\t0.598\t-0.801\t\n
}
// Better Serial Plotter example code 
// https://github.com/nathandunk/BetterSerialPlotter

void setup(){
    Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop(){
    float t = millis()/1000.0; // get program time
    Serial.print(t);           // output time in seconds as first variable
    Serial.print(" ");         // add spacing between variables

    float var_sin = sin(t); 
    Serial.print(var_sin);  // output sin(t) variable
    Serial.print(" ");      // add spacing between variables

    float var_cos = cos(t); 
    Serial.print(var_cos);  // output cos(t) variable
    Serial.println();       // this just prints a \n character if you don't provide an argument

    // at 2.5 seconds, this prints out like so, where numbers
    // are separated by spaces, and \n is the newline character
    // 2500 0.598 -0.801\n
}

Trouble shooting

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