motorterm
This is a simple serial terminal with data plotting capabilities. For tuning my BLDC servo I needed something that would plot position vs time, preferrably in realtime, to make it easier to analyze and tune different control loop algorithms and parameters. Thus motorterm was born.
It's built for specific purpose so at the time the customizability is fairly low. The code is simple though, so it can be modified for other similar purposes without too much effort. In my use case, the interaction with the board is done over a serial link. Usually a command sent to the board is a single character and the feedback follows a rudimentary protocol which outputs time, position and velocity. Lines that cannot be parsed into acceptable data are simply ignored so data to be plotted can be mixed together with extra debug info. The data are read line by line, parsed, processed and plotted as they come. There are minimal interactive features that show exact values at cursor, zero crossing positions, distance from cursor to setpoint. There's also a scrollback buffer that allows for examination of text output.
Requirements
motorterm is written in python 2.7 using pyserial and pygame. There are no other dependencies. Refer to your system documentation for information about setting up the environment. If you're on Linux and do some kind of development, chances are that you already have everything set up. On OSX I use Darwin ports, though other homebrew variants also exist.
Example usage
To debug on a typical USB to serial adapter on OSX at 230400 baud:
./graph.py /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART 230400
To try a sample test dataset without connection:
./graph.py screenlog.0
Here's an early version demo video: motorterm demo