Graphing data can help you spot irregularities

There are a lot of reasons Arduino is so popular. I think my favorite feature is serial.print(). When all else fails you can use it to dump gallons of data and then turn it into nice charts and graphs.

Case in point: this is a graph of some simple linear movements with the Stewart Platform v2. This morning I rewrote the innermost routines to smooth movement. Before I turn on a robot and risk breaking anything I like to simulate it and check that the data looks sane. Graphs like this can help me spot inconsistencies and surprises that a big table of numbers could not.

Special thanks to OpenOffice.org Calc for providing the table to graph software.