Data logging to computer

robbieinc

Hello Everyone!

This is my first thread, I had a few questions regarding data logging on with the propeller on a professional development board. I am attempting to receive data from the propeller and log it on my computer in a way that I can access it via a file or a program I could write. What would be the best way to go about this? I know the Serial Terminal receives debug information but I could not find a way to access the raw data directly.

T Chap

Robbie, welcome to the forum. Do you have any experience writing apps for your platform that could receive the Prop data? If not, there are a number of ways to go about it. Do you want an off the shelf solution or are you wanting to put together your own custom application to do the logging?

Mike Green

What do you mean by "raw data"?

If you mean data that's either internal to the Prop or directly from sensors attached to the Prop, you can't directly access that.

The Prop acts as a "master". It controls what it does and what's connected to it. It (the program in the Prop) also controls what gets communicated to an attached PC. You can write a Prop program that is essentially driven by information sent from the PC. ViewPort is a 3rd party program for the PC and Prop that, via a small program included in any program you write for the Prop, allows the PC to display and modify specific data in your program and, to some extent, control your Prop from the PC.

max72

A possible solution is to get a SD card adapter, and write raw data to the secure digital.
I use this solution with GPS, but a PC connection is not feasible in this case.
You can send anything to the serial terminal, also your sensor data (if it is your raw data), not only debug info. In BST the terminal offers the possibility to save the data received to a text file. If it is enough for you it would be an easy solution. For instance you can already prepare a comma limited format, ready for a spreadsheet, a perl script or a math software.
Obviously it you want to log a huge amount of data things are different....

ElectricAye

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're asking for, but you might take a look at this:

http://www.parallax.com/tabid/393/default.aspx

Personally, I record everything onto SD cards and then download the data when I need to. You can easily write software for the Propeller to name your files with extension .csv so they can be opened directly in Excel, etc. If you want to use an SD card, there are tons of info available here. Just let us know.

robbieinc

Thanks for the replies everyone. I have a modest amount of programming knowledge. The reason I am avoiding SD card data logging is because I'd like the propeller to send data to my PC platform in real time in turn to be made available on the internet via a program (that I'd write) on my PC.

I've seen the internet netburner kit, but I'd like to think this can be accomplished without that hardware?

T Chap

If you already have your PC/Mac connected to the net then there is no reason you have to have any internet hardware on the Prop. Build an app with your choice of software, I like RealBasic, it is multi platform and easy to get up and running with an app talking to the Propeller. Once you are getting the data stream from the Prop, just create a method to stream it onto the web from the computer. The communication from Prop to PC is very simple.

lfreeze

I Have used Propterminal to create a save file on my desktop. From that point I used BLAT
software (free) in conjunction with windows xp task scheduler to send e-mails of the data.
You will have to create a batch file on the PC to make this work, but it has worked effectivly for a long time. I am sending hourly e-mail messages (as attachments) of the downloaded temperature data from an additional eprom connected to the propeller.

Larry

kwinn

When acquiring and sending data to a PC my first choice is plain ascii with tab or comma seperators. It is a format that can be printed, read with virtually any terminal program, is compatible with all programming languages, and can easily be converted to other formats (text, floating point, hex, binary, etc.).

StefanL38

Hi Robby,

welcome to the prop-forum. You can ask as many questions as you like.
Everybody in this forum is friendly and patient. If you ask very basic questions you make the "almost" newbees happy that they can answer too!

You will receive answers faster if you post concrete questions with additional information what you like to do and what you have done so far.

What I can think of what would be useful information is:

How much data (=how many characters) do you want to send as "one package"?

How often do you want to send them?
Every second? every minute?


Any kind of program that can receive serial data and that can be configured to receive data in the format 8 databits no paraty one stopbit (8N1) at a baudrate between 9600 and 115200 baud, can be used to receive data
send from the propeller.

You can use the programming-serial cable to send and receive serial data

I recommend using the FullDuplexSerialPlus-object as this object provides
methods to send and receive serial data as strings or decimal, binary, hexadecimal values.

So next question is which software or programming-language do you want to use? With which programminglanguage do you have experience?
I think most of them have an option to receive serial data.

best regards

Stefan