ArduPlot

A real-time serial plotter that automatically adjusts itself to your use case.

ArduPlot acts both as a traditional serial monitor and a real-time data visualization tool.

When a specially formatted packet is received by ArduPlot, such as this one:

{"1&n&l&Gyro X":-1.892217994,"1&n&l&Gyro Y":-3.09271574,"1&n&l&Gyro Z":-0.000549316,"2&n&l&Front distance (cm)":0,"2&n&l&Front strength":0,"0&n&h&VL53L5LX&8&8&0&1000":[662,653,644,643,639,637,635,595,648,648,633,634,633,632,621,604,652,637,633,634,628,619,593,405,631,637,641,607,622,598,311,283,326,320,327,315,299,290,284,272,276,278,276,282,283,294,314,296,274,272,275,266,277,299,322,302,218,223,207,185,203,231,245,261],"3&n&l&Color: b_comp":0,"3&n&l&Color: c_comp":0,"3&n&l&Color: g_comp":0,"3&n&l&Color: r_comp":0,"0&i":3}

It gets parsed and turned into different graphs, depending on the json key value.

This leaves to the microcontroller the choice of how to best display the data it has.

To correctly format the data, MicroPlot is used.

Supported graph types

• Line
• Multi-line
• Heatmap

Future features

• Bar graph
• Scatter plot
• Scroll back and stop ArduPlot time
• Save and inspect data
• Optional CRC in communication

Running ArduPlot

To run ArduPlot, you need to download the precompiled binaries from the Releases page

Then navigate in the folder where you extracted ArduPlot and run

./ArduPlot

If necessary, change the permissions of the ArduPlot file:

chmod +x ArduPlot

Additional info for Linux users

Make sure the current user is in the dialout group, otherwise you will get an error while trying to connect to the serial port. To check you can run the following command:

groups $USER

To add your user to the group, run the following command, then reboot.

sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER

Building ArduPlot

Clone the repository

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Dave879/ArduPlot.git 

Install the packages xorg-dev and libx11-dev:

sudo apt install xorg-dev libx11-dev libsystemd-dev

In the case of a Debian-based distro

Then, to configure the CMake project, run:

./scripts/configure.sh

To build:

./scripts/build.sh

Then, to run ArduPlot:

./scripts/run.sh

There is an additional script which is a shorthand of running ./scripts/build.sh and then ./scripts/run.sh which is called ./scripts/buildandrun.sh

NOTE: The -j flag can be appended to the ./scripts/build.sh and ./scripts/buildandrun.sh commands to speed up compilation