WSerial

WSerial is a Serial Monitor and a Serial Plotter to visualize data from devices transmitting data using Serial. This is developed at Waterloop and is one of the best-in-class GUI design out there. You can either clone this project and follow the development instructions to build it locally or install our prebuilt binaries (they will be added soon).

Features

• Scales well on HDPI devices
• Built using Qt so, it compiles directly on your machine
• Uses GPU with OpenGL acceleration instead of CPU for plotting data on the plotter for smooth user experience
• Flexibility to make the range of X Axis values of the plotter longer and shorter
• Y Axis scales based on the highest and the lowest value encountered on the screen, two options available for fine-tuning:
  • "Best fit" takes the visible portion of the plot and fits it as snugly as it can on the Y Axis
  • "Extremes only" (default) just increases the maximum/minimum limit of the Y Axis respectively when a maximum/minimum is reached
• Allows the opening of Serial window and the plotter at the same time
• Allows the user to pause the Serial output on the screen
• Allows for changing ports and baudrate

Development Instructions for Windows

1. Install Open Source Qt from this link

2. Be sure to select the version of Qt and Qt installer to be >= 5.4. Under the Qt option, you can deselect everything but the following to make the install take up a lot less space:

   • MinGW (gcc for Windows): for some reason, the one bundled with Qt is 32-bit only, but this is easy to use and compatible with GCC

     (and/or)

     MSVC (MS Visual C++): have to install this compiler separately from Microsoft, this option only enables support under Qt

   • Sources: includes most of the Qt libraries, including the serial port library

   • Qt Charts: for the Serial Plotter

3. Open Qt Creator and drag wserial.pro into the window

Development Instructions for Linux

1. You can either use your distro's Qt packages (recommended), or install Open Source Qt from this link. The latter is preferable if your distro has not updated their Qt packages in a while (for example Ubuntu LTS), or if you don't have Qt version >= 5.4 available to you
2. Different distro's split up Qt into different packages, for example on Arch Linux, you need qt5-base, qt5-serialport, and qt5-charts. If you went with the installer option, look at the Windows section above for more details on what you need to select in the installer (you won't have MSVC or MinGW, since you need to install your distro's gcc on linux)
3. Open Qt Creator and drag wserial.pro into the window. Alternatively you can open the project from the menu and select wserial.pro file.