Plotcat
Hello all, I’m writing once again after almost six months. As the title of this post suggests I’ll be writing about plotting the live input data from a serial device using python. This data can be any input data that is comming through a serial port from any device such as a microcontroller, Arduino, any usart based wireless module such as HC-05 or HM-10 etc.
The reason I am writing this post is during past three or four months I did few small projects for Slightgen. where in most of the projects one of the main task was to plot the data that is coming from a microcontroller over serial port in the realtime.
Now to plot this data is certainly not a big thing but it becomes really hectic when you have to do the same thing over and over again. I searched if there is any python library that lets me do that but found none. So once the projects were done I decided to write one so that the next time I won’t have to write the long code again.
This way I started writing Plotcat. I just wanted to create a tool where all I have to do is give logic to get the data from serial device and the tool will take care of all the plotting.
Now Using plotcat now I can do that.
Sample code for using plotcat ca be found here.
there is also a script live_plot.py with plotcat.
live_plot.py handles a lots of exceptions and lets you
- multiple subplots inside the figure.
- set max and min limit for y axis.
- set how many samples to be plotted.
for more details take a look at the wiki
Once everything was done Chandan taught me how to create .spec file and rpm packaging for python.
plotcat is also hosted on copr at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/girish946/plotcat/
you can install plotcat on fedora 22 and above.
$ dnf copr enable girish946/plotcat
$ dnf install python-plotcat