Arduino - Serial Plotter

Hardware Required

Or you can buy the following sensor kit:

About Serial Plotter

Serial Plotter is one of the tools in Arduino IDE. Arduino can read the temperature, humidity or any kind of sensor data, and send it to Serial Plotter. Serial Plotter receives data from Arduino and visualizes data as waveforms. Serial Plotter can visualize not only single but also multiple sensor data in the same graph.

Data is exchanged between Serial Plotter and Arduino via USB cable, which is also used to upload the code to Arduino. Therefore, To use Serial Plotter, we MUST connect Arduino and PC via this cable.

Serial Plotter includes a selection box to select the serial baud rate and a graph:

• X-axis: represent the time. It has 500 points. The time between each point is the time between two consecutive Serial.println() function calls. This time is usually equal to the time of loop() function.
• Y-axis: represents the values received from Arduino. The Y-axis automatically adjusts itself as the value increases or decreases.

How To Open Serial Plotter

On Arduino IDE, Click Serial Plotter icon

Plotting of Single Line in Graph

To print a single graph, we just need to send the data and terminate it by “\r\n” character.

In detail, we just need to use Serial.println() function

Example Code

This example reads the value from an analog input pin and plots them on Serial Plotter

Quick Steps

• Copy the above code and open with Arduino IDE
• Click Upload button on Arduino IDE to upload code to Arduino
• Open Serial Plotter
• Select baurate 9600
• See graph on Serial Plotter

Plotting of Multiple Lines in Graph

When we want to plot multiple variables, we need to separate variables from each other by “\t” or " " character. The last value MUST be terminated by “\r\n” characters.

In detail:

• The first variable

• The middle variables

• The last variable

Example Code

This example reads the value from 4 analog input pins and plots them on Serial Plotter

Multiple Graph:

Example of 3 Sine Waveforms

Multiple Sine Waveform Graph:

Video Tutorial

We are considering to make the video tutorials. If you think the video tutorials are essential, please subscribe to our YouTube channel to give us motivation for making the videos.

Additional Knowledge

• It's possible to view the serial plotter on the smartphone or tablet. To do so, you need to use PHPoC WiFi shield.

Function References

• Serial.available()
• Serial.begin()
• Serial.print()
• Serial.println()
• Serial.read()
• Serial.readBytes()
• Serial.readBytesUntil()
• Serial.readString()
• Serial.readStringUntil()
• Serial.write()

The Best Arduino Starter Kit

• See the best Arduino kit for beginner

See Also

• Arduino - Software Installization
• Arduino - Hardware Preparation
• Arduino - Hello World
• Arduino - Code Structure
• Arduino - Serial Monitor