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

Linux

You can install SerialPlot for Ubuntu/Linux Mint (and other ubuntu based distributions) via Ubuntu PPA. Use below commands to add ppa to your system and install SerialPlot.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hyozd/serialplot
apt update
apt install serialplot

Windows

You can obtain windows installation packages from downloads section.

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

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 over SVN and built for you. You should have svn installed for this.

• If your linux distribution has libqwt-qt5-dev or qwt-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://bitbucket.org/hyOzd/serialplot/downloads

hg clone https://hyOzd@bitbucket.org/hyOzd/serialplot
cd serialplot
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

You can also build with QtCreator IDE 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, you shouldn't have any problems.

• Port error 13 happens when closing. This is a Qt issue. It's known to not happen with Qt 5.4.1 . Not fatal.

License

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