Standard Interface
The Standard Interface (Figure 6) is where we add
controls like switches, buttons, text boxes, and labels to
the Basic Interface. It still has a large plot area along with
a set of menu buttons, switches, and text boxes on the
bottom for most of the other Interfaces we’ll discuss
shortly.
48 November 2013
Figure 4. Basic
“no frills” plot.
Figure 5.
Basic plot
pull-down
menus and
toolbar.
Basic "No Frills" Interface
The no frills Interface is about as “basic” as it gets — a
blank plotting screen with a set of toolbar icons to set up
and control your plots. If you just want to get a quick
glimpse of how your micro’s data is doing, this is the
Interface to use. In Figure 4, you can see both analog and
digital data being plotted without any meters or switches,
etc. — just a plain vanilla data plot to give you an idea of
what is being output. Like a lot of things that seem simple
on the surface, there is a powerful plotting tool behind
this Interface.
The toolbar icons — along with the top line menu
(Figure 5) — form the basis for all the other Interface’s
menu controls. Here, you can set up either a serial or
TCP/IP connection to your micro; change horizontal and
vertical scales; switch time bases from seconds, minutes,
hours, and real time; scale raw A2D (analog-to-digital)
output values to their correct voltage levels without any
additional micro code (just the raw A2D value); save all
the data to an Excel CSV formatted file; print what’s on
the screen; and lot’s more. The Basic Interface is so
extensive, in fact, that we’ve devoted an entire video
series to it on our website. Just log on to
www.makerplot.com and check out the Basic Plotting
Video Tutorial Series. We guarantee you’ll learn a lot.
Figure 6. Standard
Interface.
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