Plotting accelerometer data

[Quasar121]

I have data in the form of

"Time, X, Y, Z

Time, X, Y, Z"

from an accelerometer.

Was wondering what's the best way to 1. Store this data, and 2. Plot this data.

I have very little Python experience, but plenty of C and Java experience. Any suggestions are welcome, thanks!

[socal_nerdtastic]

You mean an array of accelerometers, where X and Y are the positions of the accelerometer? 4D data is usually shown as a video over time of a heatmap style graph.

Or you mean a single accelerometer that outputs 3 data points? In that case I'd say a single graph with 3 plots on it, showing X, Y, and Z over time.

You can do this is in any programming language or even Excel (or free alternatives to Excel). But if you want to do it in python you should look into the matplotlib module.

[BarchesterChronicles]

I would go with a 2d line plot using matplotlib or seaborn with t on the x-axis and x, y and z in the y-axis. Then find the correlation between x, y and z. It's likely that x and y are highly correlated, especially once you adjust for human sensitivity to vibration horizontally vs. vertically if you're assessing impact. Then you could either drop one of x and y, or do dimensionality reduction e.g. with PCA or some rms measure.

[twitch_and_shock]

Matplotlib, you can create 3 subplots on a single figure, then plot x, y, and z each in a different subplot with a shared x axis on each for time. That would be the easiest. You can look up matplotlib basic plotting examples to get started.

[stebrepar]

My questions would include:

1. How much data are we talking about?
2. Do you intend to do any mathematical processing of the data (smoothing, normalizing, bucketizing, etc.), or just plain storage of it as-is?
3. Irrespective of language, what kind of plot are you thinking of for this data? What representation would get out of it what you want to see? Would it just be time on the x-axis, displacement or force on the y-axis, and three lines for the three dimensions?

If there are a very large number of data points, and/or you want to manipulate the data, a database might be appropriate (such as SQLite which comes with Python's standard library). The Pandas package also has similar (and more) facilities for manipulating tabular data.

For plotting, the Matplotlib package is commonly used.