HTMAA

Unfortuantely, I had to do this week's assignment post-final, which was less than ideal. Everyone was gone and while this week was intended to be completed virtually, turns out I could've used the assistance. I didn't end up getting anything working this week because I cut on time and couldn't ask for assistance but that's ok. I'll document some weird bugs here.

Weird bug showing a false ""successful wheel installation"" after changing the name of file

The plan was simple: pyserial and matplotlib. The execution less simple. I chose these because I am faily comfortable with Python after my years of use. However, I have not used pyserial before and it has been some time since I used matplotlib. Turns out this was one of my biggest time sinks --- installing matplotlib. Matplotlib required a number of dependencies and my wheel build kept failing. I coudn't figure out why and went donw several rabbit holes trying to figure out why. A wheel is used in the installation of a package so I sought out a pre-built wheel but even when I had the right specs, amd-64 for my 64-bit python on a windows machine, the wheel still failed. As you can see in the image above, after changing the filename to say "any", I tricked pip into looking past some things. However, even though the image says successfully installed. It wasn't. So I tracked down another computer and installed matplotlib in a few minutes there.

Then came the "easy" part. Reading from a port and then plotting the data. It was simple in theory, but hard in practice because I couldn't figure out how to get it to read continuously. I will post the partially written code here for those who are curious but this is mostly for documenting purposes.