live-serial is a simple package that ties pyserial, matplotlib and
csv together to create a real-time plotter and logger of serial port
data. This is intended to make life easier for people who work with sensors who
need to see real-time feedback when they interact with the sensors.
pip install live-serial
The package includes a script livemon.py that starts the plotting and
logging. Although the script is documented internally, the most common use cases
are:
livemon.py COM3 -logdir C:\sensordata\
on a Windows machine, and:
livemon.py /dev/ttyACM0 -logdir ~/sensordata
for linux or MacOS. That command will open a live plotting window and log the
port data to file simultaneously. To see a full list of examples and
command-line arguments, type livemon.py -examples.
Although the command-line parameters are useful for many quick tasks, repetitive debugging of a multi-sensor serial port setup can be tedious. For these cases, we recommend creating a configuration file (an example is shown in sensors.cfg). This is also a great way to share configuration information with other team members working on the same project: they just need to change the port numbers in the config file for their system.
The documentation on configuration options is at API Documentation.
To run all the unit tests to make sure that your local setup is working
correctly, you will need to have socat installed (for UNIX-based systems), or
some virtual COM ports running (for Windows). socat is available via apt-get
and brew. For Windows systems, you will need to find a virtual port generator
(we have used https://freevirtualserialports.com/ before and it worked fine). On
Windows, the COM ports are assigned by the OS, so we can't label them for
you. The scripts expect COM1 and COM3 to be the writeable, virtual ports
(attached to COM2 and COM4 respectively). If that is not the case, the unit
tests will not work out of the box for you. You can edit tests/conftest.py (~
line 20) and tests/test_multi.py (~ line 15) to use different port numbers.
cd live-serial
tox
Full API documentation is hosted at github pages.