Serieal Console Oscilloscope

Motivation

Embedded systems often require streaming data from a device through a terminal. Today it is common to record the data and then post-process the recorded text file with a script to display a plot. This project allows the user to plot variables graphically in real-time as you would plot electrical signals with an oscilloscope.

Introduction

This project was built off an incredibly awesome github project and YouTube tutorial that built an egui application to plot real-time readings from the serial console.

Features added in this project:

Ineractive serial console
Auto find serial ports, drop down selectable
Multi-variable plotting
Export text logs and CSV (almost working)

Usage

# Clone the repo
git clone git@github.com:shanemmattner/Serial_Console_Oscilloscope.git

# Navigate to the application folder
cd Serial_Console_Oscilloscope/application

# Build/run the application
cargo run

You should now see the first screen:

Plug in your device, go to the drop down menu, and pick the correct port:

Messages will start streaming in from the port on the left side of the screen:

Input the variable you want to plot in the Variables text box on the right. When you press enter you should see the plotting start.

Note: The variable name must be of the format: *variable/punctuation*Value**space*. You must also have a return after the variable name, this lets the plotter know you're done inputting the name and start looking for the data.

My Variables field contains counter at . Notice the space as well as a return to a new line:

counter at

Given a sterial stream of:

counter at 51375
counter at 51376
counter at 51377
...

We want to zoom in a bit on the y-axis so let's enter a value in the Include Y-axis Range box:

Next let's save the data to a CSV by clicking the Export CSV button:

Finally, let's save the logs to a text file. Enter a name for the file and press Save logs:

TODO

High priority

Deleting trace removes it from plot
Improve serial reading
- Currently dropping a lot of characters
Set size of left panel and serial messages
- Size gets messed up right now depending on the length of serial message received

Medium priority

Timestamps for incoming data
- x_axis_formatter
Save data to CSV accurately
Serialize data and put into polars dataframe
Start/stop reading serial port
Set y-axis
Trace labels
Multiple y-axis
- issue open on github for this
input for changing look_behind
Allow users to toggle seeing rows that are used for collecting data
- So terminal isn't flooded with data
Drop down menu
- Quit
- Disconnect from device
Allow timestamps from processor instead of timestamps from application side

Low priority

Generate Plotly plot from data
Row of options for each trace
- toggle visibility
- perform some function on it
profile code to see what's taking the most processing time
improve string parsing error handling
option to apply some function to each trace of data
- ie performa a moving average on a signal, multiply 2 signals, or more complicated math
Parse symbol file and show user list of variables they can access
- Requires the associated firmware logic to send back arbitrary memory addresses
Auto recognize variables being printed and allow user to select which to add as traces
Transfer function generator between 2 signals
Option to connect to database
Make into WASM app
Change name of signal on plot
Digital decoding (ie allow users to pack 32 outputs into one int)
Integrate with oscilloscope data
- Does Saleae allow for this?
Hardware in the loop testing
- Integrate DAC/GPIO output
Calculate live statistics about signals
- Allow for user to set a window
In general: think about the features an oscilloscope has that we might want here.

Known Bugs

Reading the serial terminal isn't perfect. We often lose data, especially when there's a lot of text coming through
Left panel will grow and shrink with text