Plotting Setup Tutorial

Basic plotting in Neptus

Neptus has the capability to plot IMC messages, using the Real-Time plot (found in View) in the operator's console toolbar.

In the DUNE Task Interactions tutorial, we displayed the temperature by printing it to the command line. This way of displaying values is only appropriate for debugging purposes, as it is difficult to follow multiple values, and it is difficult to spot changes and trends. Instead, we will use the plotting capabilities of Neptus to display the values. This will also show how you can modify DUNE config parameters from Neptus, in real time.

• Edit the prodcon.ini config file from the Task Interactions tutorial. To interact with Neptus, DUNE needs to run Transports.Announce and Transports.Discovery. For simplicity, we will pretend that we are a simulated UAV, and add [Require ../../simulation/uav.ini] to the start of prodcon.ini, since configuration already takes care of Neptus interactions. prodcon.ini should now look like this:

[Require ../../simulation/uav.ini]

[Tutorials.TempProd/P1]
Enabled = Always
Entity Label = Producer1
Mean value = 37
Standard deviation = 0.5

[Tutorials.TempProd/P2]
Enabled = Always
Entity Label = Producer2
Mean value = 45
Standard deviation = 0.1

[Tutorials.TempCons]
Enabled = Always
Entity Label = Consumer
Target Producer = Producer1

[Transports.Logging]
Enabled = Always
Entity Label = Logger
Transports = Temperature

• Generate configuration file for neptus: Neptus needs to know what parameters are available from a given vehicle, so we need to generate this file and place it in the appropriate folder: ./dune -c development/Tutorials/prodcon -p Simulation -X /path/to/neptus/conf/params.
• Run dune: ./dune -c development/Tutorials/prodcon -p Simulation and open your desired Neptus console.
• Watch the IMC messages in Neptus: In View->Incomming data, you should select x8-00 in the dropdown at the top. Find Temperature in the list on the left. The tabs indicate the different entities that send the Temperature message, so you should see both Producer1 and Producer2.
• Display values in real time plot:
  • Open View->Real-Time plot, click Settings, change the text field to say addTimeSeries value("Temperature.value"), and hit the cross.
  • What happens? The value will jump between the values from the two producers, which is not ideal
  • Instead, change the Settings text field to

    
    temperature_p1 = value("Temperature.Producer1.value")
    addTimeSeries  temperature_p1
    temperature_p2 = value("Temperature.Producer2.value")
    addTimeSeries temperature_p2
    

    Now each of the two producers have their own line in the plot.

For more details on scripting possibilities in the real-time plugin see this tutorial: Real-time plot scripts

For more details on scripting possibilities in the Mission Review and Analysis (MRA) see this tutorial: Mission Analysis and Review Scripts