jalinei / serialplot

Small and simple software for plotting data from serial port in realtime.

SerialPlot

Small and simple software for plotting data from serial port in realtime.

Features

• Reading data from serial port
• Binary data formats (u)int8, (u)int16, (u)int32, float
• User defined frame format for robust operation
• ASCII input (Comma Separated Values)
• Synchronized multi channel plotting
• Define and send commands to the device in ASCII or binary format
• Take snapshots of the current waveform and save to CSV file

See hackaday.io page for screenshots.

Installation

You can obtain windows and linux binary packages hackaday.io page:

https://hackaday.io/project/5334-serialplot-realtime-plotting-software

Dependencies

• Qt 5, including SerialPort module
• Qwt 6.1

Building

Obtain Dependencies

• Qt5 development packages
• Qt5 SerialPort module
• CMake
• Mercurial

Under Ubuntu/Debian: apt install qtbase5-dev libqt5serialport5-dev cmake mercurial

Under OpenSUSE: zypper in libqt5-qtbase-devel libqt5-qtserialbus-devel libqt5-qtserialport-devel cmake mercurial

Download and Install Qwt [Optional]

Qwt is the library that provides plotting widgets for SerialPlot. You have 3 different options for Qwt.

• Leave it to serialplot build scripts. Qwt will be downloaded and built for you.

• If your linux distribution has the libqwt-qt5-dev or qwt-qt5-devel or, on OpenSUSE, qwt6-qt5-devel package, install it and set BUILD_QWT cmake option to false.

• Download Qwt 6 here and build it yourself per these instructions and install. Make sure you use Qt5 (not Qt4) to build. And set BUILD_QWT cmake option to false.

Download and Build SerialPlot

You can use Mercurial to download SerialPlot source code. Or you can download it from here: https://hg.sr.ht/~hyozd/serialplot/

hg clone https://hg.sr.ht/~hyozd/serialplot/
cd serialplot
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

You can also build with QtCreator IDE (or qmake) using serialplot.pro file.

Known Issues

• On Ubuntu 16.04 / Linux Mint 18, removing USB serial device while it is open in SerialPlot, causes application to go into a nasty loop and eventually it crashes. This is a bug of Qt 5.5. I have uploaded a patched version of the problematic libqt5serialport5 package to launchpad ppa. If you install SerialPlot from there or use AppImage binary, you shouldn't have any problems.

License

This software is licensed under GPLv3. See file COPYING for details.