Graphing Packages

[richiereynolds]

Folks, could anyone recommend a decent free graphing package? Open source would be nice. Primarily I want to read data from the serial port and graph it so one that could do that, based on config of some sort for data format, would be great.

Faling that, a package that could take a feed of any sort and produce nice graphs would do. I'm a software engineer by trade so no issue in writing something to pull/push data from the serial port to the software but I don't want to re-invent the wheel in terms of GUI and producing the graphs.

I've been using a "processing" GUI I found on the arduino forum, which is fine, but a bit limited and clunky, though it does provide the ability to send data on the serial port too which is handy.

Thanks!

[waltr]

I use Microsoft Excel. I write the serial data to a file and use the Excel's data import.
I haven't tried but Excel also has VB (Visual Basic) built in so it could link in a COMM port package to bring serial data directly into the Excel worksheet.

[Asellith]

Open Office maybe? Excel could do it easily with some VBA script.

[garrettg84]

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/

What about using a scripting language like python?


for serial coms
http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/


Python is fairly cross platform...

[richiereynolds]

I use Microsoft Excel. I write the serial data to a file and use the Excel's data import.
I haven't tried but Excel also has VB (Visual Basic) built in so it could link in a COMM port package to bring serial data directly into the Excel worksheet.

Was looking for something to do the graphing in realtime though, e.g. produce a line graph as the data comes in from the port, can excel do that? (Forgive my ignorance, I'm a unix person!)

[waltr]

Excel probably can not do that but with a VB script it may.

If I need a special realtime graph I write code in C using Windows API functions.

[paulstreats]

I think that you should be searching for a "Histogram" package rather than a graph package if you want to graph real time events

[richiereynolds]

Thanks for the ideas folks, heven't had time to try any lately, once I do I'll let you know which one's were good.

Dplot looks pretty interesting.

[Kirk]

Check out Processing. It is a graphical tool (java based) I found an "oscope" example that reads the serial port and draws a scrolling chart.
Kirk