Real-time plots in 20 lines

The Plot Twists

© Lead Image © Volodymyr Horbovyy, 123rf.com

© Lead Image © Volodymyr Horbovyy, 123rf.com

Article from Issue 244/2021
Author(s):

Use Gnuplot with command-line utilities.

Some excellent charting and plotting packages can be found, but if you're like me, you sometimes just want to do a quick dynamic test plot without a lot of custom setup. Gnuplot is a command-line charting utility that has been around for a while, and I was amazed how easy it was to get up and running. In only 20 lines of scripting code, I was able to create real-time line and bar charts.

In this article, I introduce Gnuplot with two dynamic examples: The first shows the status of Raspberry Pi I/O pins, and the second is a line chart of CPU diagnostics.

Getting Started

Gnuplot [1] can be installed on Linux, Windows, and macOS. To install Gnuplot on Ubuntu, enter:

[...]

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