Motivation

Debugging real-time systems is not always easy.

When dealing with real-time systems, consisting of different computers, several processes and software components written in different programming languages, one often needs to debug these systems and figure out what is going on. Simply halting a process with a debugger is not an option, since the other processes will continue. Also, you might have a robotic system which will continue to move when the program is being halted.

To debug these kind of systems, one can use several techniques:

• debug printf: simply print lines to a console
• logging: log events to a text file
• print values in a CSV file

Most of these methods have some downsides.

A better option would be to stream data to a GUI and visualize it right away. This is exactly was lognplot aims to do.