Help me plot data in windows XP/SP3

[fourtytwo42]

Hi Everybody

I have lots of realtime data to plot (temperatures, voltages etc), would be nice in realtime but batch would be OK. Of course I am looking for free software only.

I have tried Excell Macro's and they are very user unfriendly as is Visual Basic IMOP completely overloaded with horrible windows style overlong names etc etc.

I have tried to get GNUplot working that I have heard good reports for however unfortunately Cygwin is not very XP/SP3 friendly and even after that it requires a lot of messing around with Xwindows and the like.
There is another Linux package KST I have yet to try but I suspect the same environment problems.

Finally I have heard mention of SciDavis that is available as a native windows app.

Does anybody have any other candidates, experience or suggestions ?

I should mention it would be lovely to slide a given sized plot window along a large file, sort of a magnify function but then I am dreaming of utopia! Also this doesn't sound that different from an oscilloscope or data logger application so this has been done many times before but potentially only using expensive tools

[Karel]

https://www.teuniz.net/edfbrowser/

You can also open a streaming/growing data file and watch the data realtime.

The only requirement is, you need to supply your data in the EDF or BDF format.

EDFbrowser has also a converter that let you convert data in stored in ascii/csv format to EDF.

If you have some experience with C programming, you can use the EDFlib https://www.teuniz.net/edflib/ library to convert whatever data to EDF and visualize it in EDFbrowser.

Runs fine on windows XP.

[fourtytwo42]

Many thanks Karel this looks the perfect program for me

Yes I tinker in C but I also see there are many built in file converters the Binary/Raw being the most interesting. I also see it can manage streaming, dynamically displaying updates to a file. This is leagues ahead of anything else I have discovered and I am sure will help many others

Actually I was wrong the best import for CSV files is ASCII however it treats numbers as signed, this can be eliminated by the zoom function but gets to be a problem with more than one channel. On the whole streets ahead of excell and very good quick solution

[T3sl4co1l]

Back in the days when XP was king, I used Octave 3.0 with GNUPlot, and AFAIK, it ran native, not in Cygwin (but that would be a fine way to go as well, I would think -- given the quirks of both *nix and Windows interfaces, that is).  Worked fine, for what it was (i.e., not a very good MATLAB substitute, but usable).  You should be able to render things with it, maybe using a command line script (or whatever language you like).

Should be plenty of plotting facilities in any of the common scripting/programming languages.  Give or take compatibility in modern versions (you might need to use an old version; needless to say, an XP machine should be air gapped anyway, so the extra security risks of old versions shouldn't be making things worse for you).  So, Java, Perl, PHP, Python and such.

And there's always Javascript.  Ugly hack (gee, y'think?), you could do something roundabout but otherwise very portable: say, make a very basic server that dumps your real-time plotting data to a TCP port (this would be in C or C# or VB or whatever), then connect a socket to that in Javascript.  The browser then handles all the rendering/formatting (via the many JS plotting libraries out there).

Tim

[Andy Watson]

Another vote for GNUplot. I've only used it under Linux and it will definitely plot "on-the-fly". I thought that a windoze version was available - no messing about with cygwyn.

http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~pjohnson/Gnuplot/windows_gnuplot.html

[enz]

I used Gnuplot native on windows, definitely no messing with Cygwin necessary.

However, for plotting (also live) I recently discovered kst2:
https://kst-plot.kde.org/

Like it a lot, very responsive. Even with large data files.
It can also read many different ASCI formats due to a very convenient parser.
There is also a native windows build available for this program.

[fourtytwo42]

Thank you so much for those that told me GnuPlot ran on native windows I did not realize that

Is that also true of KST ? I looked at that package but had it down as Linux only ? (edit excuse my ignorance/blindness I see windows version now)!

Tim I really don't want to set about learning  Java, Perl, PHP, Python etc, that's surely as bad as VB ? I totally hate the windows programmatic interface and have sworn never to have anything to do with it, far to verbose I have better things to do with my mind and life hahaha Give me simple Posix anyday! Edit but I had not realised Octave is yet another plotting package available directly on windows, thank you

[fourtytwo42]

I have been trialing various bits of software as follows
4.1   Comparison table (windows compatible only)
Name   Can read CSV   Scripts   Data scaling   Zoom   Averaging   Dynamic update
EDFbrowser   yes   no   no   yes   Yes (lpf)   
Gnuplot   yes   Yes (windows)   yes   yes   NO   
KST   yes   no   no      no   no
Octave   No   Yes         No   
SciDavis   Partial   Yes            
Frankly Gnuplot is the only contender BUT averaging needs to be done externally

So now I am into scripts/languages for doing averaging and other stats, I looked at some native windows stuff but it requires .NET installation that is not only huge but a security risk IMOP.

Sticking with POSIX seems to imply Cygwin so presently continuing on this path.

[fourtytwo42]

I got it working reasonably using Gnuplot to do the plotting and writing programs in C to manipulate the data (with Cygwin to use Posix) in particular averaging that Gnuplot sadly lacks.

Wanting to automate things with a DOS batch file proved interesting as Gnuplot although recognized (once it is added to the PATH variable) refuses to admit it has a windows terminal type when started in this way. The only solution I found is to invoke it with it's full path from C:....weird!

Below is a picture of energy production (relative) from late Feb to date (7 months) with various interruptions for rebuilds/experiments and failures, this uses a 72 hour rolling average on an hourly plot for clarity.