serial port plot

Serial Port Plot (v.2)

I suppose this is probably only of interest of Bryan, but I'll post what it does anyways. Yes Serial ports are legacy devices, but remain the easiest/only way to communicate between PC's and microcontrollers.

The new version features:

Plotting of multiple channels
A led panel for debugging
Dual axes plot mode
Selection of com ports
Read and write simultaneously
Double buffering of display for reduced flickering
Plot properties can be saved

The new version uses rxtx for serial communication instead of java.comm. Java has dropped all serial support for Windows because they are lazy. So much for "write once, run anywhere".

Description
Serial Port Plot opens the COM1 port, reads formatted data, plots it, and records it in a text file. In addition two Excel macros are included to open Serial Port Plot and display the data in an excel worksheet.

Data Format:

The serial port plot reads data in the following format: 42 85 95n 1.2 5 4n

Spaces denote a new column, and n defines a new row. Besides numbers, spaces, and n, all other characters are ignored. In addition, only one space is used between numbers. Two spaces will signal and error and cause the whole row to be rewritten.

LED display:

After activation, the LED display is updated using data from the highest channel. If given a byte, the LED display will represent constitutive bits. MSB is displayed on the left most LED.

The "Record" button reinitializes the display, and starts recording data.
The "Stop" button records the data to a text file that can be read in Excel with the included addin.

Serial program installation

This is kind of a pain to install...
The live grapher uses Java Swing to perform the windowing tasks, therefore; an up to date version of Java must be installed. If you have jre1.5_04 installed then use the Installation Script instructions. If you have another version then edit the script or use the Manual Install instructions.

1. Go to java.sun.com and download the latest JRE if you don't have it already.

2. Install the run time environment.

Installation Script

The script is configured for jre1.5_06, if you installed another version open the script with a text editor, and change to path to match your jre. Then save the file.

Open Excel and install the add-in.

To run from Excel use the runLiveGraph macro ;

To run from the command prompt in the serial folder type: java Sgui

To get values use the getData macro (you may have to change to path in the macro to open the data file);

Manual Install

Copy the Serial folder to C:\

Copy the RXTXcomm.jar to C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.{yourversion}\lib\ext

Copy the rxtxSerial.dll to C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.{yourversion}\bin

Install the excel addin

To run from excel use the runLiveGraph macro;

To run from the command prompt in the serial folder type: java Sgui

To get values use the getData macro (you may have to change to path in the macro to open the data file);