Serial Port Plot
I suppose this is probably only of interest to Bryan, but
I'll post what it does anyways. Yes serial ports are outdated,
but remain the easiest/only way to commuicate between PC's and
microcontrollers.
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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:
Best described by the following example: 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 plot program 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. For
some reason Swing won't display the "K" program icon if the program is
run from another computer; I'm no Java expert so I just let it go.
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 RunSerial macro;
To get values use the ImportText macro;
Manual Install
Make the directory c:\serial and copy the contents of serialjav\classfiles to it.
Copy the win32.dll C:\Program Files\Java\jre{yourversion}\bin
Copy the comm.jar and the javax.comm.properties file C:\Program Files\Java\jre{yourversion}\lib
Copy the comm.jar C:\Program Files\Java\jre{yourversion}\lib\ext
Install the excel addin
To run from excel use the RunSerial macro;
To get values use the ImportText macro;