Society of Robots - Robot Forum

Software => Software => Topic started by: richiereynolds on January 27, 2011, 11:46:06 AM

Title: Graphing Packages
Post by: richiereynolds on January 27, 2011, 11:46:06 AM: 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!
Title: Re: Graphing Packages
Post by: waltr on January 27, 2011, 12:08:47 PM: 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.
Title: Re: Graphing Packages
Post by: Asellith on January 27, 2011, 12:35:30 PM: Open Office maybe? Excel could do it easily with some VBA script.
Title: Re: Graphing Packages
Post by: garrettg84 on January 27, 2011, 01:11:57 PM: http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/ (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/)

What about using a scripting language like python?

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

Python is fairly cross platform...
Title: Re: Graphing Packages
Post by: richiereynolds on January 27, 2011, 04:40:56 PM: Quote from: waltr on January 27, 2011, 12:08:47 PM
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!)
Title: Re: Graphing Packages
Post by: waltr on January 27, 2011, 05:41:27 PM: 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.
Title: Re: Graphing Packages
Post by: paulstreats on January 29, 2011, 04:13:24 AM: I think that you should be searching for a "Histogram" package rather than a graph package if you want to graph real time events
Title: Re: Graphing Packages
Post by: richiereynolds on February 07, 2011, 02:57:48 PM: 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.
Title: Re: Graphing Packages
Post by: Kirk on February 18, 2011, 10:59:12 PM: 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