A better way of debugging sensors with a realtime plotter

Debugging sensors on a microprocessor can be a hassle and the most used approach is to output the sensor values to a serial monitor. I made a realtime plotting tool which is a better and more visual way of doing the same thing. 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:

RealtimePlotterProcessing-300x216.png

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN2oXuavrWk


- 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).


More info and code at http://sebastiannilsson.com/en/projekt/realtime-plotter/realtime-data-plotter/

Just wanted to share it if someone else will find it useful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN2oXuavrWk

Sebastian,Nifty! It looks

Sebastian,

Nifty!  It looks like it might be useful depending on the project.  I put this in the toolbox for later user.  Thanks for posting.

Regards,

Bill

Looks good, and your right about the visual feedback debugging

Im using Smoothie Charts  http://smoothiecharts.org/  to stream dynamic realtime sensor data to my control console.

I had a need to dump live to HTML5 canvas, so it worked for me.  A couple lines of code to initialize each inbound variable and away you go.

 

This looks really good.  Good luck.