Real time graph plotting.....on pc gui...

Dear friends ,

Please suggest me how to proceed for following project:

1.Real time data capturing from serial port of pc , (microchip microcontroller uart transmitting) .
2.The microcontroller based hardware is driving some relays .
3.I have to read temperature data from microcontroller , display the changing temp on pc side gui in form of graph.
4.The pc side gui also controls the relays of the attached uc hardware.

Please suggest me ,is using excel for graph plotting a good solution , how to embedd excel data graph in c# form .

I want to make this application in c# . Please suggest me which is the best way to proceed .

thanks in advance....

If you would like to use excel than you probably won't have the plot in real time. Maybe there is a way for writing a Visual Basic script for Excel and access the serial port but it will be not so good idea. If you are using C# then the best way is to use System.Drawing and System.Drawing.Drawing2D namespaces. You will find there everything for 2D graphics. If you want to use 3D graphics and use your graphics engine then there is something like Managed DirectX on NET platform. Some time ago I was working on it - the application was capturing large amount of data and representing real-time 3D graph with frame rate at least 25Hz. I must to say that it is easy to start and it has big possibilities.

If you would like to import excel sheets into C# tables then you can use ODBC or Excel Object Model. I think that there are more ways to do it like using Microsoft Jet Engine but I don't know nothing about it.

I am still struggling for the solution.......

please suggest which is the best possible solution to read a stream of temperature data in the form of uart transmission from a microcontroller, to a pc plotting the point with each data capture......the plotting has to be real time dynamic with every data plotting on graph.....i want to use c#.....


The gui should also be able to show graph and control some relays on the hardware( through uart only) .

Please suggest.....

Thanks and regards...
Jitender Singh

What is the bandwidth ?

the sampling has to be around 10 samples per second.......that is not the issue......i want to know which platform will be useful for real time plotting of temp vs time graph .:

visual c# , how........i just want to read data from microcontroller in pc and plot it in a graph

plz help.....

Free tools which I can recommend are Visual c# Express and Sharp Develop. The second one is free for commercial applications. Both are very similar with basic toolset. Visual Studio has more goodies.

The canvas class library can help you to plot a graph.




+++