Nice 1D and 2D plotting tool

[Erwin Timmerman]

Hi all,

You have been of great help to me in the past, and over time I made a program that might be interesting for some of you to use as well. It can be found at

http://www.phys.tue.nl/people/etimmerman/specview

It is essentially a CVI 6.0 Graph plot, with a program built around it. You can load a lot of different types of files into the program (text, binary, with a lot of options), do smoothing, spike elimination, etc. I have tried my best to make the program as easy to use as possible, as far as zooming, manipulating a lot of plots at the same time etc. is concerned. Furthermore the program can be controlled by DDE so it is possible to save a measure data file and make your program open it in Spectrum Viewer (since LabVIEW also supports DDE it should work together allright). This could eliminate a requirement to make your own graph window.

The program was basically made with a user in mind who is sitting next to a measuring machine that spits out a lot of plots. He wants to have a quick look at those, compare them to each other, throw away the failed measurements, maybe do some smoothing or spike elimination and some simple analysis on the succeeded measurements.

The program is freeware, so you may use it as you like. If some of you would take a look at it and give me some feedback and tips, I would appreciate it very much. It was written in CVI but useability tips can come from any platform, and we're all just one happy NI family, aren't we 🙂

Greetings,

Erwin Timmerman

[Erwin Timmerman]

No one? Any comment is welcome, even "this program is a complete waste of time". A polite silence is quite scary, as I'm thinking of all the comments you guys try to spare me of 🙂

[Approximately]

Beautiful, this is really neat. I wish I had more time to play with it . .. Surely, I'll think of some way to make use of this. 🙂

Richard Osborne
NUWC Test Equipment Engineering

[Joe_H]

NICE!!!!!!! I will have lots of uses for this. Have not had much time to use it but what I have used of it I like.

thank you

[Joe_Guo]

It looks nice!

[Erwin Timmerman]

Thanks all for your nice comments. For the people who downloaded version 1.8 and actually use it, I've made a small update to 1.8.1.

The updates are:
- By special request: Normalize Y. Multiplies the Y values of a given plot in such a way that the largest value of the whole plot becomes equal to a value you specify. When you draw a "zooming rectangle" before selecting Normalize Y, only the Y values of the data points within the X range of the rectangle will be used to calculate the multiply factor, before the whole plot will be multiplied with this factor.
- The folder history in the "file open" panel is now saved when the program is closed. It used to contain only the folders opened during a particular session, now it contains all folders opened in the past, up to 15 folders.
- A minor bug fix that would ask the user a confirmation twice when he wanted to overwrite a file.
- A minor bug fix that would require a file-to-open in the command line to be a .svf file.

Normally I wouldn't release such a minor update but since someone specially requested the normalize function, I thought it might come in handy for some of you as well. So maybe the updates are not of any use to you, but maybe the normalize function was just what you needed 🙂 Funny how a program grows by user demand. I usually get the question "can it do ...." and my standard reply is "not yet... probably tomorrow!" 🙂

Anyway, when you want to update you can download the 600 kB update right from the home page, and extract the zipped files into the program folder (with subdirectories, the manual pages go into the SVDocs folder).

Good luck, have fun, and thank you!

Regards,

Erwin Timmerman

[Erwin Timmerman]

Hi all, there's a new update available for people who want it, version 2.0 has arrived.

Some interesting new functions:

• The XY value displays (on the top right of the graph) are now continuously updated when the mouse is moved, no need to click on the graph to get a value
• Drag plot. You can pick up a plot by the mouse and drag it to any place you want. A bit easier than manually giving the numeric values with the shift X and shift Y command.
• Copy to clipboard. In order to export the data sets to Excel or similar programs, you had to choose View->Table and then ctrl-a, ctrl-c. With "copy to clipboard" you can skip this step.

• Easier drawing of the zoom rectangle. When you want to draw a rectangle to the edge of the graph, you can go over the edge with the mouse, you don't have to position the mouse exactly on the edge anymore.

• Many functions now support selecting just a part of a plot by drawing a rectangle before invoking a specific function, like:

• "Delete data points" deletes (discards or interpolates by choice) all the data points within a drawn rectangle. Handy for deleting single spikes from a plot. For data sets with a lot of spikes it is better to choose the "delete large spikes" command in the "smooth" menu.

• "Draw new data set" works now with dragging, instead of just clicking. Ctrl-Z deletes the last data point(s) you drew, one at a time.

• Resample, define a given number of data points and the program spreads them out over your plot. Might be handy when your data points are not x-equidistant.

• Drag and drop of measure files into Spectrum Viewer

• The "open special format" settings now include axis names and graph title.

 Downloading can be done the same way as the message above describes. Have fun!

Erwin Timmerman

[Erwin Timmerman]

Version 2.3 has arrived.

Highlights of new features since 2.0:

• Added trace table. Of all plots it displays the Y values belonging to the cursor X value.
• Added drag point. Delete spikes by dragging the individual data points to their place.
• All new manual! It has a far better menu, many sample plots and some source code for programmers.
• Envelope. Calculates the minimum and maximum value of all selected plots.
• Added X axis time format display (h:m:s instead of just very many seconds)
• ctrl-click hides a plot instantly
• ctrl-shift-click selects a plot and all the plots originating from the same data file
• "Open special format" now supports external plug-ins for very complex measure files.

Go to the page in the first post to download the program.

Have fun!