Adruino Serial Plotter

The Arduino Serial Plotter function has been added to the Arduino IDE, allowing you to natively graph serial data from your Arduino to your computer in real time. If you’re tired of seeing your Arduino’s analog sensor input data pour onto your screen like The Matrix, this looks like a prettier way to visualize what’s going on. The Serial plotter is an offline tool allowing you too Visualize data and troubleshoot your code offline without having to use third parts services like Processing or Plotly. Since there is no official documentation on the Arduino website regarding the use & functionality of the Serial Plotter, I decided to documents its uses and features.

Features

• Plotting of Multiple Graph
• Offline
• Auto-Resize Graph
• Supports Negative Value graphs
• Auto-scroll along X-axis
• Different colours for each variable

Applications

• Offline Data Visualization
• Code Troubleshooting
• Waveform Analysis

Step 1: Plotting a Graph

Now that you have installed the latest version of the Arduino IDE(1.6.7 or above) its time to understand how the Serial Plotter actually works. The Arduino Serial Plotter takes incoming serial data values over the USB connection and is able to graph the data along the X/Y axis, beyond just seeing numbers being spit out on to the Serial Monitor. The vertical Y-axis auto adjusts itself as the value of the output increases or decreases, and the X-axis is a fixed 500 point axis with each tick of the axis equal to an executed Serial.println() command. In other words the plot is updated along the X-axis every time the Serial.println() is updated with a new value.