Debugging sensors on a microprocessor can be a hassle and the most used approach is to output the sensor values to a serial monitor. Realtime plotting is a better and more visual way of doing the same thing.
- Real-time plotter of your data while it is still being processed by your application
- Plots live data from serial port. Microprocessor choice does not matter as long as it can send serial data to your computer.
- 6 channels of data (and this can be increased if necessary)
- Live bar charts
- Live line graphs
- You just send the data you want to debug with a space as delimiter like this “value1 value2 value3 value4 value5 value6”. Floats or integers does not matter.
- Open source
- Robust. It will not crash because of corrupt data stream or similar.
- Multi platform Java. Tested on OSX and Windows 8 (and should work on Linux as well).
I created this software to debug an Arduino Due on my self-balancing robot. To tune the controls of the robot I needed fast feedback to know if I was making progress or not. The video below demonstrates typical use of the realtime plotter:
Download
Download
You can also follow the project at Github. If you make improvements to the source code, please share it by making a pull request at Github.
How to install and use
Since I have an Arduino I will use it as example but any micro processor can be used.
- Get ProcessingIDE to run the code. It is a neat and useful IDE for doing graphical stuff.
- Download controlP5 gui library and unzip it into your Processing libraries folder
- Connect the Arduino to the usb or serial port of your computer.
- Upload the example code (RealtimePlotterArduinoCode) to the Arduino
- Check serial monitor (at 115200) and check that it outputs data in the format “value1 value2 value3 value4 value5 value6”.
- Close the serial monitor (since only one resource can use the serial port at the same time).
- Open the Processing sketch and edit the serial port name to correspond to the actual port (“COM3”, “COM5”, “/dev/tty.usbmodem1411” or whatever you have)
- Run the sketch
Advanced use
The realtime plotter can be expanded to also send commands to the microprocessor. The usual approach when programming microprocessors is to set some parameters in the beginning of the code, upload them to the processor, see the result, change the parameters again, upload, and so on until satisfactory performance is achieved. This iterative process takes a lot of time and a better approach is to send updated parameters to the microprocessor from your computer via serial data. For example I needed to tune some parameters on my robot and created a command panel that runs in parallell with the realtime plotter. For each change in parameters I immediately am able to see the result on the plotting screen. Example code of this is located in /RealtimePlotterWithControlPanel.
(More info at http://sebastiannilsson.com)