How to Plot in Thonny

Plotting is a great way to visualize sensor data in your Raspberry Pi application. Thonny has a simple plotting tool that can be easily integrated into your print statements in MicroPython so you can start plotting right away.

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Step 1-) Select Plotter Tool in the Menu Bar

Simply go to View > Plotter

You will see an empty plotter appear on the bottom right.

Step 2-) How to Use Plotter

Plotter simply takes the latest print statement and prints it on the screen. You can print multiple graphs on the same plotter by adding them to the print statement as follows.

print("Data 1", datapoint_1, "Data 2", datapoint_2)

In the print statement above Data 1 and Data 2 are simply the labels in the legend while datapoint1 and datapoint_2 are just data you get from a data stream. The data will resemble the following:

**Note that I changed the labels in this diagram because this is from another project.

You would want to utilize such print statements in a loop mechanism. Due to the simplicity of the plotter, you can only plot simple data streams, multi-dimensional data is not supported by this tool! However, it could be great for some applications.

Conclusion

That is how you make a simple plot in Thonny with no packages needed. You can use this to visualize your data streams in real-time and it can be incredibly convenient.

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