The following instructions detail
the best way I've found to take data coming from the MindFlex/Arduino, save
to file and then graph in Excel
PuTTY
Download PuTTY from http://www.putty.org/
Once
installed, start Putty
Select the session page and select Serial - amend the
COM port to be the one you're using for the MindFlex input from
Arduino
Select Session>Logging. Select 'All Session
Output' and then select Browse to select where the file is saved too. I
usually select to save to the desktop and leave the default name as
putty.log. Change the name if you want to. Now click open. You should see
a window appear showing the parsed data from the Mindflex. When you close
the window, you should also see the file on the desktop (or use File
Explorer to navigate to the location you selected). If you see the line 'Error:
packet to long' dont worry (I think these lines are coming from the
Brain.h library rather than Putty because I see them in the data when running
Brain-Grapher as well)
If you like you can save
these settings in the Sessions page and then just select them as soon as
you start Putty.
Open File in Excel
Before opening the file in Excel, you need to delate the
file header. Open the file in Notepad or similar and just delete the first
line that says '-------Putty Log date time----'. You want a lineof numbers
to begin the file.
Start up Excel.
I've been using 2007.
File>Open and navigate to the Putty file (You may
need to select all Files to be able to see it). The Text Import Wizard
starts. Select next on the first page and then select Comma on the second
page to select the delimiter. Select Next and Finish and the numbers
should import into 11columns.
Clean up the data in Excel
Before we graph the
data, we want to get rid of the blank lines of data and lines
with the error message. Select Column K.
Select F5 and then Special.
Click the blanks option and then OK.
Now Home>Delete>Delete sheet
rows.
The blank
lines and errors should now have gone.
Basic Graphing
Select all
the data (or bits you want to graph). Insert>Area Chart>3D
Area.
It doesn't take long looking at the
graphs to see that a bit of data processing
is required to use the data. More on this coming
soon.
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