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The Arduino serial monitor is usable when you want to watch data from an Arduino. However, it does not have a built-in method for saving the data. Here are some ideas if you want to build an Arduino data logger with or without a PC.

Important note on Arduino Data Logger examples

With all of these examples, please remember that whenever you open the Arduino’s serial port, the board will reset. So if your log file shows “Initializing SD card…” with a few data lines in between, it is because there is a reset happening.

Initializing SD card…initialized.
Temp: 34, Time: 03:24:44
Temp: 33, Time: 03:24:45
Temp: 34, Time: 03:24:46
Tem

Initializing SD card…initialized.
Temp: 34, Time: 03:24:50
Temp: 34, Time: 03:24:51
Temp: 33, Time: 03:24:52
Temp: 34, Time: 03:24:53
In that code you can see data logging started and then restarted. What happened is that after programming, the board starts logging. Then when you open the Serial Monitor, the data logger restarts. To solve this issue, either disable auto-reset, add a 3-4 second delay at the start of setup(), wait for a character to be received, or wait for a button press. That will give you time to open the Serial Monitor.

My favorite Raspberry Pi add-on is the PiTFT from Adafruit. With it, you easily get a Raspberry Pi GUI interface and touch screen. The PiTFT software install is just a few things and it is good to go.

Adafruit PiTFT - Click for more info
Image from adafruit.com

This screen is what I needed for my IoT project. The Pi+Screen will act as the primary controller for all of my things. The problem is I didn’t know much about writing GUI applications in Linux. So what could I do to create a Raspberry Pi GUI?

Python is popular in Pi projects, so I decided to stick with it and find out what GUI toolkits are ready to go. “Ready to go” means they install easily on Raspian and work well on the Pi.

Here is how I got Qt5 for Python up and running to create a Raspberry Pi GUI.