Serial Port Plot

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

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.


The "Stop" button records the data to a text file that can be read in Excel.

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 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_04, 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 get values use the getData macro;


Manual Install

Copy the Serial folder to C:\

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

Copy the C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.{yourversion}\lib

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

Install the excel addin

To run from excel use the runLiveGraph macro;

To get values use the getData macro;