The Serial Plotter, introduced in version 1.6.6 (Nov. 2015), in my opinion, is "the best thing since sliced bread", and it got a lot of improvements since then.
In many cases, there is no more reason to use Processing, or export data from the Serial Monitor to Excel.
There are some minor drawbacks, as it is not really a y-t-plotter (you have to produce time tick marks on a separate channel), and you have to take care to send the same amount of numerical data with each println, other wise strange things will happen.
My wishes:
- could there be a checkbox [] Autoscroll as there is in the Serial Monitor? That would be useful if you want to take a screenshot for documentation purposes. Well, I know: the problem is what is going to happen with incoming data while Autoscroll is stopped.
- the permanent autoscaling can get confusing. By now, I stop autoscaling by sending MIN and MAX as extra channel data. But this is just a work-around.
- resizing the plotter window can lead to strange results. Have a look at this (not very sophisticated) code:
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
for (int i = 0; i < 500; i++) Serial.println(10*(i & 1));
}
void loop() {}
If the width of the plotter window equals 580 pixels everything is allright. But if you stretch it somehow you will get the Moire-effect.
It would be nice to have a button [ ] original width (scale 1.0) or [ ] double width (scale 2.0)
In the picture attached I stretched the width of the window to 600 pixels, and you clearly see the Moire artefacts (20 gaps which are not part of the signal). With real random data, in most cases you would not detect this.
