Ardiunor Lets You Analyze Arduino Serial Data in R

If you’ve used Arduino or similar boards using the Arduino IDE for any amount of time, you’re familiar with its serial console. This is an incredibly useful diagnostic tool, but if you dig just a little deeper, you’ll find the “Serial Plotter,” which you may have just assumed was for… someone else? This too can actually also be very useful, letting you graph how variables change over time. Data scientist Han Zhu, however, saw an opportunity to take things even further.

In order to better work with sensor data, Zhu created an interface called “arduinor” to stream data into R — a programming language focused on statistics and graphics — and the Rstudio IDE. As of now, his interface only runs on Mac or Linux computers, though he notes that “Windows support might come later.”

Besides giving users the ability to better work with real-time data, this setup can save information as a CSV file for later analysis. If this sounds like something you’d like to try, the needed files can be found on GitHub, and more info on the project is available on Zhu’s website. A very short demo of the system graphing accelerometer data is shown in the tweets below.