Nuts and Volts - April 2014

need to click the green rocker switch until it turns red to break the serial connection from your micro, just to keep the micro’s data from interfering with the manually input data. Then, you’ll need to click on the small Plot icon on the toolbar (the one that looks like a computer monitor) to get plotting going. Finally, bring up the Logs(Debug) Immediate window and click the Clear Log button to start fresh.

To manually enter commands and data, simply key them into the rectangular area at the bottom of the window and push the Enter key (Figure 9). We’ve started with the !RSET instruction in order to clear the plot area and to reset the plot to time zero. We followed this with six groups of analog data, with each group having three values. You can see the reset instruction and the six analog data groups in the main window, along with the matching plotted lines that are created by the analog data.

Each line has its own color to identify it, with black as channel 0; red as channel 1; and blue as channel 2. You can have up to 10 analog channels — each with their own color. Of course, you can change those plot line colors, but that’s a subject for another article.

The point about entering analog data manually or in code is that MakerPlot treats any string of numerical ASCII characters that are separated by a comma and terminated with a carriage return as analog data; no other prefixes or suffixes are necessary.

It’s a little different for digital data. With digital data, you need to prefix the 1 and 0 ASCII string with a percent (%) character followed by the data itself, then a carriage return. Figure 10 is such an example. Again, we started with the !RSET instruction and keyed in five sets of digital data, although we could have gone up to 32. You can mix analog and digital data along with instructions and messages together. That’s the beauty of this simple yet powerful debugging tool.

Terminal Mode

Up until now, we’ve been in Plot mode. For this next example, we’ve switched to Terminal mode (Figure 11). The display changes to yellow to alert you to the changed display mode. This is yet another way to see what’s coming in from your micro’s serial link. Here, you can see what MakerPlot sees as the !READ(Slider) instruction is followed by the analog setpoint and pot values, then the digital values for the pushbutton switches and the setpoint crossing level.

Video

To get a better idea of how the Logs(Debug)

Immediate window works, go to the MakerPlot website and follow this path Basic Plotting Video ➔ Logs(Debug)

Immediate Tab. Here, you can see what happens in the window with live data coming in; it will give you a much better handle on how it can work for you.