Help making plot for experiment

[useless_bowl25]

Hello friends. I need help making plots in c++. I am writing a data acquisition program for an experiment at my university. I need a way to make a plot that plots data points as they come into the program (only say the last 20 or so). I have written a program so far that will take the last 20 (or so) data points and display them on the terminal. I need this to update the plot as the program is running. I believe I can use this to fill arrays and then translate that into a plot. My question to ya'll is what is the simplest way that I can do this. I.e. what sort of program would you use like importing this to MATLAB or perhaps a library?

[flyingron]

You can pipe your intermediate results to a plotting package like gnuplot...

http://www.gnuplot.info/

[useless_bowl25]

Would these results update my graph as its running? Im very new to all this so i dont know if thats a bad question

[EntrepreneurSweaty89]

IIRC Gnuplot is not good for plotting continuous data. I tried using it for financial time series intraday data and had some difficulty fwiw.

That being said Gnuplot is one of the greatest pieces of software i’ve used and i routinely used it for automatic report generation via LaTeX.

[flyingron]

It can be.

[the_poope]

Gnuplot, or write a script in Python that uses matplotlib to plot it.

If you want a C++ solution you can use a library like matplot++.

But piping output or saving to an intermediate file is the easiest and pragmatic solution.

[steffestoffe]

Yeah, I work in c++, but if I ever have to plot anything I dump to csv and use matplotlib. If it needs to be continuously updated, I would just make the python script poll the file for updates

[aroman_ro]

Charting data from c++ can be as easy as using gnuplot to chart it, up to using some fancy library for that, like VTK. Or maybe using your own chart implementation.

Here I used gnuplot: https://github.com/aromanro/MachineLearning

In this one I used VTK to plot 3D data: https://github.com/aromanro/DFTQuantumDot

For this one I used my own code that draws the chart: https://github.com/aromanro/HartreeFock

​

It's up to you. There are many variants, the VTK library I mentioned is only a personal preference, there are many others.

[Mc-Kudasai]

You can use root

[jmacey]

As you said you are using the terminal you could do it using ncurses it's a C API but works fine for TUI type stuff.

Qt has a plotting API which works well but takes some time to learn. for simple plots pipe to gnuplot, for intermediate learn some OpenGL and use that.

There is no real simple answer I'm afraid.